ON THIS DIET YOU MAY HAVE

All the fruit you want. Whole

novels, great loaves of mystery

and nonfiction. Any vegetables

save legumes and white potatoes

though you may read novels

whose characters eat these foods.

Green beans, snap peas.

Yes, I know they are legumes

but they are more pod than pea.

Wasn’t it ever thus with you?

Arise, arise and do not eat

grain of any kind. Neither shall

anything that came through a cow

or any other udder pass your lips.

The cow you may eat. Yea, verily,

even the goat. You may eat fish,

fowl. No swan. The diet does not

prohibit swan, but be reasonable.

Nothing good comes of a fairytale

in which someone eats a swan.

Use the brain God gave you

petite though it may be.

You may eat poetry till you

are plumb stuffed with metaphor.

I believe that’s it: fruit, veg,

flesh. No sweetener, no sugar

of any kind, real or dreamed up,

which means no wine nor any

of alcohol’s elixirs. No chocolate

unless you can pucker up to it

unsweetened. You may starve

and whine but you will be well-

read and free of inflammation.

–George Ella Lyon

ANCESTRAL QUESTION

Papa Dave’s older brother Claude

married and moved to California

from the mountains of Tennessee.

Word of Claude never scaled

the Rockies or rippled Kansas wheat

until his unnamed wife poisoned him

with a piece of peach pie. No one knew

where they lived, no one knew why he died.

How did they know it was peach?

–George Ella Lyon

I rue the day I

threw away my Rolodex.

Wireless. Software-free.

–George Ella Lyon

When the hospital wouldn’t let Mother go
because her bowels had seized up
after the pleurisy treatment, her dad
arrived with a packet of dried rhubarb.

He took a dime from his pocket,
measured enough of the pink
powder to coat it, then stirred
the rhubarb into a glass of water.
“Drink this, Glad,” he told her,
“You’ll be home in no time.”

–George Ella Lyon