Sometimes Pickles Do Not Let You Down

Cold jar – lid screwed on so tight it traps
a half-sour sizzle of fermented brine – twisted,
flipped off: freed – emits a fine exacting hiss

that tells you you have opened a Pandora’s box –
popping scattered random measures of illicit
pleasures: acid, toxic spiced incursions: garlic,

seeds and weeds – raping, ravaging the tender
and unwitting crisp pale flesh of cucumber,
imbued and bruised and suffering and losing

but still, somehow, choosing to retain a tiny dream
of its mild former being – some last soothing
breath of its dumb vegetable infancy, so fat

and stupid on the ground: so serendipitously
close to dying; sighing, first – then, quick! –
you rasp a fast hot lick: your tongue is wrung

of its assumptions: blunders wildly into sharp
new threat: tastes sweat – as if wiped off some
lean Olympic wrestler: salty, branded with

testosterone – transgressive vengeful fantasies
of glory. What is that acrid whiff that makes life
such a story? What weakens knees? What is

“pleased”? Adverbially gird yourself – let new vast
pounding definitions of “ecstatically” abound!
Sometimes pickles do not let you down.


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