My New Diet

A guy in the bar where I drink every night

told me a great lie about pigmies-how they eat

just once a year, when the rains come, and then,

it's anything in sight. It was a wet night.

We drank to the pigmie hunt, lifting beer mugs

to the giant boar, speared and dancing in the air,

the ceremony ending with a belch, the village

asleep beneath palms we imagined, then the waitress

tipping the stools up on the bar. Some nights

you have to take what you hear for fact.

Some nights you have to believe a man just because

he needs to be believed. I swung open the door

to my taxi and took him home. I slithered out

of my black dress like a python while the rain

beat its brains out on the window, the ritual thump

of zebra drums. No photographs were taken,

but the world seemed black and white when I woke

alone at dawn, hoping no one ever captures me

like this: poking my finger down my throat to return

everything false I ever swallowed, return to the eager

feeling I had as a girl, thumbing through National Geographic

on Sunday morning, hungry for another place and dying

to make something of myself; however small.