I made a healthy soup for my family’s dinner tonight.

Smoked chicken; fresh green beans, peas, and carrots; a side of rice.

Tonight, I feel like cherry Pop-Tarts,

Sugar infested, moist bread tartlets adhered together

With fake, blood red spread.

Tonight, I feel like chocolate chip cookies from the non-local Amish grocer.

Thick pucks of baked, un-buttery dough studded with chocolate cubes.

The cookie crumbles in my hands, smudges my fingers brown,

And gloms to the roof of my moth.

Maybe I will follow this up with a side of lime popsicles.

Slick, white fingers frozen-congealed to a stick.

A tart burn with a hollow sugary backtaste, enough

To tease my mind into thinking that I’m luxuriating in something healthy,

Something that will melt the brain into happy peace

Or comfort eating in which calories and fat grams and carbohydrates

And all of those tricky words mean nothing and hold no weight.

Tonight, my family will dine on homemade soup stirred together

After nine hours of work.

And I will recline on my bed and lick sticky crumbs off my fingers

And tuck crinkly, silver cellophane under the mattress and pretend that

It never happened.