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Pica

By James D’Angelo



“Pica” is the eating or craving of things that are not food but satisfy in ways you could never hope to explain.


I once told you I’d eat anything, but

I meant Sunday morning breakfasts cooked together.

Or chocolates left on pillows and found with

Timing so perfect you’d never see a stain

Even on white linen.

I meant wedding cake aimed at mouths and launched from trebuchets.


Nobody warned me one day I’d have to feed myself from mismatched basement spoons.

Or that they’d bend in cold peanut butter and break against freezer burned ice cream.

Nobody told me how hard it’d be to swallow my pride or unchoke on my words or floss the skin from my teeth after I survived by devouring crow, bones and all.


You once told me, “It’s over. Digest that.”



 


James D’Angelo is an attorney and mediator from Philadelphia. He’s also a fiction MFA candidate at Western Michigan University where he serves as a fiction editor at Third Coast. His work has appeared in Fiery Scribe Review, Third Wednesday Magazine, and Bacopa Literary Review where it won the Fiction First Prize in 2020. He’s querying a novel about two sisters surviving the foster care system.



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