Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.3 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.6)

I hold the chocolate-chip as if a coin from some dead altar,

its crust a thin, papery epidermis scored with fossil chips.

They glitter like teeth, embers trapped in crystallized sugar;

beneath that shell a warm cavity yawns, brown sugar and molasses

conspiring there in clandestine whisper, a soft counsel of heat.

I might rend it — rend and watch the interior sprawl like testimony —

but violence buries confession; to devour is a private burial.

So I practice rites: small bites, patient, tentative, a testing

that keeps the interior’s voice from fraying into scraps or apology.

It asks of me a kindly cruelty: respect the form, refuse the rough hand.

Even starving, I hear a low breath — a private, ritual sound —

and wrap the thing in waxed silk, slide it into the chest of cold,

where jars dream and the icebox hums like a distant choir.

By the jarred light a sugar-moth heart beats slow; I take a small fragment,

press it to my tongue, and taste not food but oath — warm memory as pact.

I keep the rest as reliquary and sin; so every ordinary mouthful

afterward is lit, edged, and haunted by that preserved, patient menace.