Since Sherry moved

It's been a lot of mornings of mixed ingredients, and incredulity. Look at what we have doubles of, I say. Nutritional yeast, vital wheat gluten? Who else? A note to tell me to eat the sushi she wrapped in toasted nori and left in tupperware. Makeshift muesli we both eat, pushing our glasses up, with raw oats and hazelnuts and cinnamon and (what we call) milk I make in the blender with almond butter when we're out of raw almonds. A friend drunkenly sleeps in his boots on our living room floor while I spill reconstituted goji berries and buckwheat groats in the kitchen. A mother who can't get going and a father who won't quit. Noah is abruptly living with us, so scarce, barely taking up half a shelf in our hall closet. Eating raw cauliflower for breakfast and bowls of brussel sprouts for dinner. A kind of vegetable-rich squatting, all three of us drinking coffee late into the night and sleeping like shaking or devastated or excited toddlers. We eat like we're anticipating something, all of a sudden three people curled into the table I used alone for so many months. We buy coconut oil with his leftover food stamps and I use it to cook or to keep my face from drying out and think of how Tita uses almond oil on her lips in Like Water for Chocolate. Bismarck and Liliana the guineas hide under their pink igloo when I walk through Sherry's bedroom. A giant bale of hay arrives in the mail, and she says, "Gotta feed the piggums," but it seems to me like the rest of us, they half-eat their food and half-inhabit it.