I pry open the plastic clamshell
of baby arugula, tear into the bag
of baby lettuce, pick the baby carrots
from the market bin and tuck them
into my recyclable supermarket tote
with other baby vegetables.
They will be delicious but still
I will feel like a pedophile
enjoying these sweet young flowers
of God’s creation before they have grown
to full size, before they have basked
their intended amount in the sunlight
or slept in their earthen wombs,
before they have drunk their allotted share
of earthly water. Someone else
has cut short these tender lives and we,
my friend, are devouring them
like perverts in a damp garage.
And they taste so good.
                        

When you eat your first artichoke
you are daring and cultured;
a member of an elite
with taste refined enough to savor
the delicate flesh in the recess
of thorny tip and barbed leaf,
patient enough to wade
through the thicket of leaves
picking your way to the prickly choke.
You are not like your forebears
crashing through dry grasses
to come upon the bristling bush
with its towers of thorns,
tearing at the painful flowers
in search of sustenance, anything
to help them remain in this life
and be able to pass down
those stalwart genes that would enable
their progeny thousands of years thence
to pick out a shrink-wrapped 
pack of thistles from a grocery shelf
and know already, among other
cultivated secrets, the right way 
to cook and eat them.
                        

This is the one I chose
from a bin at the farmer's market
between a pond of parsnips
and a crate of beets:
jaundiced skin, protruding hairs,
flesh scratched and scarred
from its travel through the earth,
sallow statue like some armless
creature dragging its lumpy body
over the earth. There's a bend
where it tapers and rises
(I imagine it reaching
into the earth, searching)
and here on my kitchen table
this tail looks like the head
instead and I realize it's all
upside down. I begin to see
a greater world: this root
and all the other things that reach
into the earth searching
for nourishment are like negative
numbers in a world where up 
is down and heads are tails. 
I imagine cooking 
this root creature and eating it,
and I wonder if I can.