Do not make a stingy sandwich,
Pile the cold cuts high.
Customer should see salami
Coming through the rye.
	—Allan Sherman

The best thing about this is that 
soon we will get to eat. 

It’s not that I’m hungry again 
(I’m never hungry) but that I love 

how food looks on my plate - 
cold cuts peeking out of brown 

bread, colorful garnishes 
of this three course lunch - 

carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, 
half a sour pickle. Then an apple, 

or in summer a nectarine, 
followed by a small cappuccino 

and a piece of dark chocolate. 
All that lovely fussing with knives 

and spreads, the purring coffee machine, 
the marvelous tool that cores the fruit,

renders it into eight wedges, 
like some undersea wonder at my fingertips.
                        

It’s four o’clock and I’m starving, 
so I rise, moving aside the quilt, 
and there I am, floating through 
the house. It’s cold, though already 
there is a glimmer of light 
through the kitchen window. 
I step carefully down the stairs 
to weigh myself. I’ve lost 
another pound and I don’t know 
whether to be glad or alarmed. 
Clearly I’m still asleep, 
and though I started out alone, 
now we are speaking, 
maybe on the phone, though 
you are right here beside me in the bed.
You tell me to eat something 
and I think ice cream. 
Or peanut butter. 
What is healthy to eat 
in the middle of the night?
Once in China I ate three 
deep fried scorpions - 
but you didn’t have your phone 
so I have no proof. 
It was at the night market 
in Beijing and I really was awake.
They tasted pretty good, 
crunchy like chips fried in sesame oil. 
We rode on the subway, 
visited a vast and empty museum, 
where young armed guards watched us 
as we made our way through the corridors of dream.