Marko Sijan

FEEDING FRENZY

The infant screams, gets suckled, laughs later
when he sneezes creamed spinach on her face,
before he cries and rubs his bum as a woman
waddles by in the grocer’s aisle: “Mama, she fat!”

The boy wonders what’s eating his mommy but
then he throws up her liver and onions. She spanks him
with a wooden spoon, sprinkles sugar into a bowl
of chopped apples, mangoes, kiwis, peaches and
sends him downstairs where he nibbles first her fruit

followed in youth by new breasts. In the basement he chews
on why his mom hates his girlfriends and doesn’t talk
about her past; why she serves up her cancer and implants
years after the fact. All the meat she pounds and fries

fattens the man who finds out her father fondled her,
until he couldn’t get it up anymore and shot himself.
She thinks her son doesn’t know, while a secret of his own
in which he wishes her dead omits her breasts,
the succulent ones he misses and can’t remember.



Marko Sijan’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in journals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, Maisonneuve and This Magazine. He blogs at The Huffington Post and co-edits Encore Literary Magazine. His novel Mongrel, “a stuart ross book” out from Mansfield Press, was named one of the “Best First Books” of 2011 by The Globe and Mail, and long-listed for a ReLit Award in 2012. Marko lives in Montreal.