The Beeting Heart

I don’t like beets for their sanctimoniousness.

Cut in half, they are the baroque hearts of a merciful christ,
best martyred with reduced balsamic
and surrounded by white stars of goat cheese.

Not so, the humble celery.
The Doric pillars of the garden,
they prefer to stand in the back row of the chorus,
mouthing their lines,
rather than singing the solo at high mass.

Then there was the time I invited a tomatillo to dinner.
We sat across from each other,
staring off,
bored at the site of one-another
and lost for conversation;
my Spanish as rusty as her English.

Once a carrot came to our Christmas party.
Drunk on brandy,
it flirted with a married woman,
picked a fight with her husband,
then stumbled into the the fireplace.

Rescued when it’s orange flesh had caramelized,
we placed it on a bed of radicchio
to recover.