like newsprint slowly yellowing, when food
can't be bitter or spicy or hot or sour,
then people drink sweet pop, gobble sweet cupcakes
under icings and pour sugar on presweetened
breakfast crunchies and eat iceberg lettuce
with thick orange corn-syrup dressing, sugar
in the hamburgers and fish sticks.
Swelling in our soft mounded flesh, instead
of ornery people, we want our food to love us.
The child learns: Love is sugar.
She grows up sucking, chewing, nibbling
and is still and always hungry in her cancerous
cells busy and angry as swarming ants.
—Marge Piercy
(from My Mother's Body. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Copyright © 1985 by Marge Piercy.)
