Of Avocados and Death Stars

Someone very wise once said something along the lines of how you can't pick a flower "without troubling a star." Madeleine L'Engle made that into a book title, to a novel that sank deep into my consciousness when I was a teenager. That may explain a lot about me.

I don't consider myself a craftivist. Not alternative fact. My pussy is a fluffy white domestic longhair cat, I've never driven a hybrid vehicle, I prescribed OCPs to teenagers in my practice for menstrual problems although I wasn't exactly encouraged to talk about sex, and my idea of a pipeline is that statistical program we plug our raw data into on my research project.

I am also a woman, a minority, an immigrant, and a scientist.

Rebellions are built on nope.

These dishcloths were the natural product. I didn't mean to make them, but it was that or tattooing the Rebel Alliance emblem on my arse. The knitting pattern was probably simpler and slightly less painful (also not subject to stretch marks), and I suppose you could always convert the letters into a "poster" blanket a la Shepherd Fairey, though I'm not so talented as to figure out shading and faces so you're on your own there.

And then there was the avocado poem. Still don't know where that one came from. Don't ask, don't tell?

Ode to an Avocado

At night the ghosts of Smoot

and Hawley walk the halls:

I wonder if they carry their heads

and by what contrivance, and if

they ride to a migrant chorus

chiming the hours in wicker baskets.

The flesh of the avocado

is smooth like sin, green as money

crossing the border on flatbeds

for love of the game: no floozy

is more lecherized, squeezed when ripe,

silky between lips like a fresh girl.

“My kingdom for a fruit,” said no

leader ever, but since the people

won't about-face, perhaps the produce

will turn its pebbly other cheek,

oblivious to history, while in guacamole

we read the course of empires.