Spinach - Katie Grieson

Last summer I ate

spinach salads with

strawberry balsamic. I worked

body half-out

a fast-food window

& sold lukewarm chicken fingers.

I made piña coladas

in my best friend’s bedroom

stirred pineapple &

coconut with

the only fork we had

& we drank too much, sleeping

limb on limb

in her living room,

the extra bed, tipsy

& in platonic love. I drove

to work and back. I went on a date

& got home at one o’clock

& remembered their hands.

I paid too much

for bad coffee. We went to the Hoover Dam

& worried about the water

getting low, the earth

getting hotter. I spent the money

I made. I threw up

brown into my toilet. I counted

calories. I went

to San Diego & ate a caesar salad

in the airport. I slept on a couch.

I slept in a cabin & mice bit

the food, long teeth marks

on the peaches, on the

avocados, strips of green

exposed. I lost weight. I kissed

my cat on his fuzzy forehead.

I cut my hair. I stood

on a scale. I went

to the gynecologist. I laid

down on the Dr.’s cold

thin paper & waited too long

wishing her to say I was

a different person and went home

with her thumb still

inside me. Last summer

I ate spinach salads.

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Katie Grierson believes in aliens. She is a 2020 YoungArts Finalist in Novel-Writing, was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts Semifinalist, is an alumni of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, and has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets as the 2022 Jean Burden Prize winner. Besides being prose editor for Lumiere Review, she also overuses the em dash and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Body Without Organs and Dishsoap Quaterly, among others.