Eat

My mother is holding my infant son

so I can eat the mustard cabbage

she has sweetened with brown sugar.

For the starving children in China,

I have learned to eat whatever I am given.

Even mustard cabbage, which I hate.

She nods approvingly.

Now I must eat to feed

not only all the world's starving children

but my own flesh and blood,

my infant son

who fattens daily on my milk,

my milk that trickles a thin blue stream

into his wet pink mouth.

I grow thinner.

He is sucking the living

daylights out of you,

says my mother,

and with a bamboo rice stick paddle,

she slaps another helping onto my plate.