Jon Tribble is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by Southern Illinois University Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology.

Tribble says: "'Pica' is a poem that grew out of a fascination with the flavors of inedible things. I remembered the paste-eaters of kindergarten and elementary school, and I have been guilty of chewing on too many pencils over the years myself. I let my imagination take off from there."

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Pica

by Jon Tribble

The world’s flavors entice,

tease desire from a tongue

whose memory is of chalk

and playing fields, blackboard oceans

misting the fine white dust like

spray against the stony shore,

pale green knowledge for

the sharpened cue snapping

the yellow point of the triangle

of spheres to attention and scattershot,

marking the enameled white ball

with a kiss of dry grass.

The pencil’s meal of slick

yellow skin slipping, lodged

between the edges of teeth

like the nagging whine of wheel

bearings catching every second

or third turn, the chewy splinter

of wood gumming its way

to an almost-gluey mass the kin

of paper and dry leaf when the tang

of chlorophyll is lost, the flat clean

clot of gray wincing taste to shuddering

hunger leaded heavy with need

like a straight line, like a hammer

kissing a nail flush with the board.

But ash is desire’s true answer,

ash the burning of the world

in twilight to dusk, ash consuming

bread and bone and twig and brick

like a cry or creak or knock or whisper

feeds silence’s flame, cold ash filling

the mouth like a whimper or punch

or kiss can take the breath away.