Eat Your Words
Janet Kuypers
4/2/19, written the day
after Edible Book Day,
on twitter and Instagram and Tumblr
With the family sick and in bed yesterday,
I thought about the Edible Book Festival
that I was at home missing out on. With
my library of books, both made and read,
I wondered if paper was literally edible,
then saw how people celebrated this day
not by actually eating books, but making
“facsimiles” of books, like making pastries
where the icing makes food look like a
book. I had no intention, all alone, to bake
a cake to fashion into a book to eat, so
I looked for another way to “eat my words”
and added alphabet soup noodles
into my egg drop soup. Mixing letters
and numbers with strands of egg whites
really made it a messy read, but I still
had enough leftover yummy word soup
to enjoy today, and maybe tomorrow.
I might not have literally made a book,
but my integration of text into my soup
was my deconstructed literary inspiration.
They tell you not to play with your food,
but April 1st was a day I could play with
my letters within my food, that form
the words that describe our lives. And
hey, that’s a reason to celebrate too.
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