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the table personally,
Just to be certain
The doubt
    Stays on our side
Of the fence? What do
We call the rich,
    Sweet taste of
Frozen oranges in
This context? What do
    We call a weight that
Doesn’t fingerprint,
Won’t shift,
    And can’t explode?

Appetite
    TRACY K. SMITH
    It’s easy to understand that girl’s father
Telling her it’s time to come in and eat.
Because the food is good and hot.
Because he has worked all day
In the same shirt, unbuttoned now
With its dirty neck and a patch
With his name on the chest.
    The girl is not hungry enough
To go in. She has spent all day
Indoors playing on rugs, making her eyes
See rooms and houses where there is only
Shadow and light. She knows
That she knows nothing of the world,
Which makes the stoop where she kneels
So difficult to rise from.
    But her father is ready to stuff himself
On mashed potatoes and sliced bread,
Ready to raise a leg of chicken to his lips,
Then a wing; to feel the heat enter through his teeth,
Skin giving way like nothing else
Will give way to him in this lifetime.
    He’s ready to take a bite
Of the pink tomatoes while his mouth
Is still full with something else,
To hurry it down his throat
With a swig of beer, shrugging
When his wife says,
You’re setting
A bad example
. It doesn’t matter—
    Too many eyes without centers
For one day. Too many
Dice, cards, dogs with faces like sharks
Tethered to chains. It gives him
An empty feeling below his stomach,
And all he can think to call it
Is appetite. And so he will lie
When he kisses his napkin and says
Hits the spot
, as his daughter will lie
When she learns to parrot him,
Not yet knowing what her own appetite
Points to.

The Bean Eaters
    GWENDOLYN BROOKS
    They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
    Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
    And remembering …
Remembering with twinklings and twinges,
    As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

The Broad Bean Sermon
    LES MURRAY
    Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying
trespass against us
in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force Dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.
    Upright with water like men, square in stem-section
they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.
    Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest
snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:
spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.
    Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight
    appear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boatkeeled ones.
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,
    beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover
    till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,
    like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …
    Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
—it is your health—you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

Beans: An Apologia for Not Loving to Cook
    JUDITH ORTIZ COFER
for Tanya
    For me memory turns on the cloying smell of