When I was young we watched a video in science with a block of cheese under a microscope.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t cheese at all but a hoard of microscopic maggots holding hands and wriggling to form what looked like a block of cheese.<\/p>\n
Block of Cheese<\/p>\n
Microscopic maggot tricksters looking like a block of cheese.<\/p>\n
I didn’t eat cheese for two years after that and wondered what else in my reality wasn’t real.<\/p>\n
I learned that every kind or cheese was actually tiny maggots cha-chaing their days away pretending to be cheese.<\/p>\n
I learned that if you had hooves or horns or poultry feet you could pretty much guarantee a heartless existence followed by a tortuous, brutal death.<\/p>\n
I learned that if a human could eat it a human would eat it with ketchup and an inalienable sense of entitlement.<\/p>\n
(Throw the maggots blocks at these guys!)<\/p>\n
I learned Mexicans picked strawberries but couldn’t get a license to drive to and from the fields. I learned the same thing about the help at our favorite restaurant.<\/p>\n
I learned most people practice compassion only when it’s convenient.<\/p>\n
I learned the more you said about it, the more you started looking like you had hooves yourself, or chicken feet, or unlicensed brown skin.<\/p>\n
I learned to eat the maggots and keep my mouth shut.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was young we watched a video in science with a block of cheese under a microscope. It wasn’t cheese at all but a hoard of microscopic maggots holding hands and wriggling to form what looked like a block of cheese. Block of Cheese…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1305,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-prompt-responses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1305"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102485"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103932,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102485\/revisions\/103932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}