HIGH CHAIR
We are drooling love-eaters
Love lands on our trays
in bite-sized chunks
Some of it stringy and fibrous
and other chunks sweet and plump
We squish love in our fingers
We cram it into our maws
Can we ever ingest enough
to want down from that chair
to feel a belly overplump
with the basic nutrients?
Like celery our bodies burn love
calories faster than we consume them
We are often picky
leaving the greens and vitamin-rich
portions untouched to grow stale
banging our dangling feet
against the plastic footrest
the treble shill of objection
our desperate grab for control
Just mewling bottomless pits
who eat love out of house and home
EVERYTHING HOLE
She takes orders like punches
each item sputtered by eager
hungry morning lips
growly tummies
toddlers screeching gapmouthed
like baby birds fallen
from a pine tree nest
Somewhere in private --
a dry closet, the bathroom stall
with a Sharpie penis and fake
phone number and glib quote
some seventh-grader thought funny,
the front seat staring into the gap
in the wheel at the old dash speedometer
before LED blinded us, molecules
and the lingering fog of stale Camels
reaching down her blouse,
into her eardrums --
she has been crying.
The mascara has run into a bruise.
It has schmeared on her sockets
like hazelnut spread
on an everything bagel.
Billy Faires is a Chattanooga native who is in the process of uprooting his wife, three children and mother to Alexandria, Va., after a 20-year career at McCallie School. He is a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate and received his M.Ed. from Vanderbilt University. He is grateful to a long line of English teachers, beginning with his mother and ending with Michael McFee at UNC, for their love of poetry and their patience with those amongst us who hail from The Island of Misfit Toys.