Pretending

For a while my mouth didn’t close
and I had to eat pizza with a fork.
This is where people interrupt and say
what do you mean, your mouth didn’t close?
and I take my two hands, wrists together,
fingers apart, and show how my jaw
closed in the back and not the front
til they opened me up and rearranged
it like a jigsaw puzzle. But I was saying
about the pizza. The fork and knife is fine
at an Italian restaurant, a nice white plate,
red-checked tablecloth, metal fork.
But you try grabbing a slice at Ray’s,
Tuesday, fifth period, with the people
you call friends because there’s no one else.
I’d press my slice hard on the Formica,
press that plastic fork til it buckled,
then saw away with those little nubs
that pretend at serrations, knife curving
like a bow. I did this with a smile,
oh, I just like eating my pizza this way.
while sizing up the geometry—
how many bites for the fewest cuts?
Eating the crust felt as impossible
as losing my virginity, so I professed
not to like it. I gave it away,
watching others bite in—crunch—
like it was nothing. Looking back,
it’s strange I never explained
the fork and knife thing, how I didn’t
want to, I just had to. The way I pretended
to like it.