It was midnight and raining when I found this green bell
pepper under the bumper of a van on 12th and John. It sparkled with drops
of water and looked fresh enough to float through the air in slow motion with
other produce in a commercial for some invented health food item. When I picked
it up, imagining how I would incorporate it in a stir fry, I found a red
drinking straw sticking out of it, crusted with black stuff. My first thought
was that it must have been used as a pipe, but there were no burnt spots or
holes. I remembered the Tropicana commercial in which juice flows easily out of
a straw stuck into an orange, and how frustrating it was, as a kid, to suck and
suck and not even get air. I finally peeled the orange violently and ate its
mushed insides. I thought of a line from a Ben Lerner poem: “It was when we
tried to drink a straw through a straw that we learned our first lesson about
form,” and decided someone stuck a straw into the pepper to avoid any
unrealistic hope for orange juice.
If you find food on the street, send location and description to sgalvin1000@gmail.com
