Poems by Tamara Madison

“Caveat Lepus”

            By Tamara Madison

Rabbit pretends

not to look

but sees me,

stands so still

in the grass

watching

with round eye

beneath

the columns

of its ears.

No need to flee;

I pose no

present danger.

I look behind

to where it stands

still as granite,

watching.

I am no predator,

true. But rabbit,

oh rabbit,

you have no idea.

“Baby Vegetables”

            By Tamara Madison

I pry open the plastic clamshell

of baby arugula, tear into the bag

of baby lettuce, pick the baby carrots

from the market bin and tuck them

into my recyclable supermarket tote

with other baby vegetables.

They will be delicious but still

I will feel like a pedophile

enjoying these sweet young flowers

of God’s creation before they have grown

to full size, before they have basked

their intended amount in the sunlight

or slept in their earthen wombs,

before they have drunk their allotted share

of earthly water. Someone else

has cut short these tender lives and we,

my friend, are devouring them

like perverts in a damp garage.

And they taste so good.

“Eating the Artichoke”

            By Tamara Madison

When you eat your first artichoke

you are daring and cultured;

a member of an elite

with taste refined enough to savor

the delicate flesh in the recess

of thorny tip and barbed leaf,

patient enough to wade

through the thicket of leaves

picking your way to the prickly choke.

You are not like your forebears

crashing through dry grasses

to come upon the bristling bush

with its towers of thorns,

tearing at the painful flowers

in search of sustenance, anything

to help them remain in this life

and be able to pass down

those stalwart genes that would enable

their progeny thousands of years thence

to pick out a shrink-wrapped

pack of thistles from a grocery shelf

and know already, among other

cultivated secrets, the right way

to cook and eat them.

- Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig and many other publications. She has recently retired from teaching English and French in Los Angeles and is happy to finally get some sleep. More about Tamara can be found at www.tamaramadisonpoetry.com

Copyright©2020 by Tamara Madison. All Rights Reserved.