Health Inspection Result
I pass by the colander near the sink,
a poor but indignantly sentimental artist’s fruit basket,
again for the hundredth time this week
But for the first time since my hurt infancy took rein this week,
I’d remembered the job title on my adult badge:
Resident Inspector
and took stock of its dead tenants
Item: eight strawberries
Condition: turned sharp leather tongues, covered in fuzzy jewelry
Notes: these, you’d promised to dip in chocolate and hand feed me in generous weekend sheets
Item: two small cantaloupes
Condition: brushed with clay earth and new serous dimples
Notes: these, gifts from your Lebanese grandma’s garden, to remind us what home tastes like
Item: seventeen clementines
Condition: melting through a neon mesh bag
Notes: these, preemptive for when you’d moan of hunger furrowed over your studies on my desk
Item: four Granny Smith apples
Condition: resiliently intact but compromised by contamination
Notes: these, for nourishing us like the Americans, for brute force-ing towards our shared dream like the Americans
I shake out the cornucopia, picking off sticky stragglers with clinical precision
into a grave overflowing with negligence
Somehow, me, the bleeding heart,
whose rain overwhelmed you into premature harvest,
feels nothing during this metal exhumation and plastic burial
Nothing moves through me, even now as I think
save an air of removed curiosity
Notes: I just think it’s interesting how, funny how,
I didn’t notice the smell of death as it permeated me, my home
But how my kitchen continues to reek of it,
weeks after throwing the lapsed produce away
Tasneem Sadok is an MD-PhD student at UCLA, interested in unraveling intricacies of the brain in contexts of dysfunction. As the American-born daughter to Tunisian immigrants who fled an autocratic regime, both her scientific and personal worldviews have always been steeped in countervailing dualities. Writing poetry has allowed her to not only find resolution in the mind-numbing tensions that interlace her constituent identities but also defamiliarize accepted realities as a way to envision new possibilities.