Growing up

Every Friday—

Every single Friday—

We ate pizza

Several pies for several boys,

Homemade,

The flour leeching to my mother’s linens

To her skin and hair like bold signs of premature aging.

The smell of oregano, uppercutting through the kitchen

So green it was in my teeth

Before I even sat down

And as the pie saucered from the pan to the board on the table

With a satisfying and salivating shffft!—

Fresh out the oven—

It bubbled like a lava flow

Sizzling its salutations

And yet hesitation

Was brushed

Away

From my father’s nose

Like a scent unfancied.

He was the first—

Always the first—

To bite

And I’d watch as his body contorted

Like it would years later

After his

Fall

Twisting, arching, hunching

Over the table so that nothing

Dropped

As the juices hit

And he would exhume this slurping sound

This simultaneous

Sucking, soothing, cooling

Of both his tongue and the still enraged slice.

He prevailed over his pizza, this small man,

In a matter of minutes

Conquering an entire pie himself

Nearly

Because it gave him what he wanted—

What he needed—

After his hands wore the ages

And his feet calloused

Upon thin dreams

And past lives

For weeks on end.

The pizza cried orange tears

That, undetected, slid down

My father’s fingers and past his wrist

Pooling at a timepiece

That gave one and not the other,

Pepperoni dotting the slice and

Reminding me of his pock marked face

So that when I consumed my own triangular sacrifice

I always blew—

And blew hard—

Not only because I was afraid to raze the roof of my mouth

In the pizza’s final plea for survival

But to also banish that unknown substance

With which my father’s essence seemed to season the pies.

And when that first bite came

There was an excavation of flavor,

The pizza revealing itself,

Relinquishing itself,

And it never tasted as good as he made it seem.

Some hungers can never be satisfied

And one should know better than to try.