The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: She Has Dreamt Again of Water by Stephanie Niu

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content warning for disordered eating

Midden / Appetite

My mother calls herself our trash heap.
She eats what we won’t, grows plump
on our leftover eggs, bread crusts,
the bitter-hearted lotus seeds we cannot stomach.
We have small appetites. Waiting for us is eating,
cutting slice after slice of pumpkin bread
until all the bowls are clean.
No one wants to be garbage, she says,
but look what I do for you.

In archaeology a trash heap is called a midden.
It means you’ve struck gold. What better map
to the way people lived than the things they discarded.
Oysters shells, chicken bones, bits of green glass,
pickle forks, shoe leather miraculously intact.
The trash is what they used, what they ate,
what they could not afford to throw away.
No buttons. No jewelry. In a California midden
where Chinese orchard workers lived
they found a single bottle for baby formula,
cracked. The glass so old it flakes,
iridescent, dragonfly wings catching light.

My mother does not like the way she looks.
In the dressing room she pinches the flesh
around her face. If someone loved me more,
maybe I wouldn’t gain weight.

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