A fish, a fig, a cinnamon stick,
and half a jar of jam.
With sourdough buns and American cheese
and thirteen slices of ham.
A carton of milk that could be bad
and pepperjack that’s now blue.
An apple, a pear, a gummy bear,
and a bottle of used up glue.
A liquid vat of ice cream
crowds the once vegetable drawer.
There’s M&M’s, KitKats, and aspirin.
And candy corn stuck to the floor.
And chili, made days ago,
with every intention of not letting it waste,
is stored in a wide-brimmed lidless cup,
and now everything permeates its taste.
What can you compose, o Maestro,
thou blessed with divine edict?
Oh I’ll use it all, and then weep,
for after cooking I must eat it.
Origin
The prompt for this writing night was inspired by an old Reddit thread where someone would claim a superpower, and the next comment would come up with its kryptonite, or constrain it in some way to negate it. This is similar to The Monkey’s Paw idea, where the use of power has a cost to it. One of my favorite representations of this is in the anime Darker than Black, where the use of a power must come with some compulsive behavior by the user to meet its price.
My friend Jenny Fung gave me the superpower prompt to write against: “My super power is being able to use up everything in the refrigerator to make a meal”, and I wrote this as a funny poem about having to eat whatever you cook.
Prompt
The featured image was generated using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, with the prompt:
a Dr Seuss like illustration of an open fridge with fish, jam, milk, bread, cheese, and ice cream in it