Noodles

The chipped bowl in the cupboard, I choose
for myself first. Where’d I learn that—

———-burnt toast trick?

Then to discover we both go
first for that old chipped blue soup bowl—

———-Is that love?

Those extra strands of oily noodles?
One more stalk of bok choi? That broth—

———-Did you give me more?

We talk about replacing bowls
each time our thumbs touch chipped rims—

———-But thumbs remember,

we chipped that bowl together, the
day you made me spicy soup noodles—

———-—you gave me the bowl of your best.

Bradley David is a writer and urban homesteader living in Los Angeles by way of the rural Great Lakes Midwest. His latest poetry is forthcoming in anthologies from Beyond Words Publishing (‘Beyond Queer Words’, 2020) and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (‘Poetics-for-the-More-than-Human-World’, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2020). He holds a B.A. in English from Michigan State University and does not have an MFA.