Saturate

The dinner guests are gone and I am left

with a sink of cooling, iridescent fat.

I feel the kitchen of its life bereft,

a hollow space where all the laughter sat.

I take the yellow foam into my grip,

a porous block of synthetic decay.

I squeeze it once and watch the gray sludge drip,

but the smell of onions will not go away.

It’s soft and swollen, heavy with the grime

of everything we ate and didn't say.

I wring it out a second, third, fourth time

and still it feels like wet and rotting clay.