Gabrielle Cole By Gabrielle Cole
.
God!
I want so much of everything,
all of the time.
He rips a piece of bread in two
and gives me half.
This feels like it should mean something.
It doesn’t.
The bread tastes like the cotton
of the pillows I used to kiss
in the cover of night,
leaving a wet spot
where my lips had been.
I’d look at what I’d done
feeling exhilarated and embarrassed and
above all,
lonely.
The bread tastes like the loneliness
that lay beside me,
its head on my damp pillow,
but I chew and swallow, all the same.
Gabrielle Cole is a Jamaican-Canadian writer and student. She enjoys books about female ennui, movies about anything, and iced caramel macchiatos. Her work has appeared in lavender bones magazine and Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc., and is forthcoming in antinarrative zine and sweet-thang zine. You can find her on Twitter @lovelieswaiting or at gabriellecole.carrd.co.
Why we chose this piece: Holy cow, what an opening. For writers who are in the submission trenches, this poem is a perfect example of you never know what will resonate with a reader or why. When the EIC’s mom was younger, she took a cardboard beer coaster and wrote the following in Sharpie: “All I want is love! All I get is homework!” EIC has loved that stained coaster ever since she found it. This poem has those same vibes. We also thought it was wonderfully random for Gabrielle to use bread as a segue to explore memories and feelings in more depth. She handles that sense of longing so deftly.
