Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.4 – Retitled -> The Cookie in the Icebox

Note: I’ve gone in a darker directions and found some different takes… more to follow after…

I hold the chocolate-chip cookie like a coin from a grave —
its crust a dry, papery skin, scored with tiny fossil chips.
They glitter as if with teeth, dull embers caught in brittle sugar.
Beneath that shell I imagine a warm, secret heart — a cavity
where brown sugar and molasses conspire and whisper.

I could rend it open with a single greedy bite
and watch the interior spill like a confession.
But violence silences secrets. Devouring is a burial.
I could nibble, patient and tentative, proving
my appetite but thinning its voice to scraps and apology.

It wants something of me. The cookie has an etiquette:
it will not be forced; it will not give its marrow to a rough hand.
Even starving, I hear it breathe — a low, private sound
that answers only to ritual. I wrap it in waxed paper,
slide it into the chest of cold where things go to sleep.

At night the icebox hums like a distant choir;
from the dark jarred light, a sugar-moth heart beats slow.
I take one small fragment, press it to my tongue,
and taste the memory of warmth — not nourishment, but oath.
I keep the rest like a reliquary, a small preserved sin,
so every ordinary mouthful afterward is edged with menace.