Tenacious

I told you that ‘tenacious’ meant tough.

A few days later we went out to eat

and you described your steak as tenacious.

That didn’t sound quite right – a person

can be tenacious, but an inanimate slab of flesh,

surely, can’t. I spent the rest of the meal

absorbed in this. Then as we held hands

on the way back, you told me about everything;

about what happened and what he did.

I felt your hand in mine, and knew

that you were still alive. You can call

a piece of meat tenacious if you want.

Damn it, you can do whatever you like – 

you can recreate the very foundations of being.

If you want to call your steak tenacious,

then who am I to object?

And if I want to worship you as a god

then how, I pray, could that be wrong?

Joshua Seigal