Carrots.

• Author: Brosman, Catharine Savage
• Position: Poem

A bunch of carrots on the cutting board have caught the corner of my eye with strange, self-designating presence. Might they be five virgins waiting to be sacrificed? Plump fingers, reddened, puffy from the gout? Mute nobles lined up for the guillotine? Or are they, rather, mermaids, bodies slim and tapered to a point, with leafy hair-- Ophelia's locks, or delicate green strands in the Sargasso Sea? I do not like the thought of immolating even flesh imagined; so I'll think of them as stuff, just vegetable matter, crisp and hard, resistant to the knife, a test for teeth. The tops go first: a quick beheading. Next, the skin: I take the peeler, scrape away. "Dice carrots finely," says the recipe. But what's to keep them rolling from the board? Bisecting them is tricky; then the halves must be cut up, and so on, till the bits are flying to all sides, and meanwhile I am fearful for my fingers, even eyes. All this for...