Lettuce is Nature’s sedative, I read somewhere,
so at three a.m., I finally
decided to make a little salad.
There were cockroaches in the refrigerator
but I washed the vegetable well, then peeled
layer after layer, startling a sleepy worm
that had crawled indignantly from beneath the leaves.
The pieces lay untidily, splashed across the plate,
like splotches of sun on the street;
so I tried another strategy—common, really,
any housewife-poet will know about it.

I took a knife, its blade seductive in the dark,
and I chopped. The fragments, I noticed, as I yawned,
had begun to take the most extraordinary shapes.
Somewhere I recognised a bride,
her toenails turned to ash,
a mother-in-law and husband shut the door.
Another piece bore the face of a politician;
a third was a child with eyes wide open.
And why did the dish resemble
a wounded Hiroshima?

I went at it like the smiling Nazi
in a half-remembered film, who invited
his prisoner to lunch, then demonstrated
the art of cutting carrots.
“Chop, chop,” he said, and as the slices fell,
still smiling, hacked the prisoner’s finger off,
two actually, with the words, “Chop, chop,”
and another smile.

That night, I discovered the reason
rabbits never seem to sleep.

First published by Adil Jussawalla in Nirvana at Ten Rupees
(XAL-Praxis, 1990)