Pretty candy in a row

Pick the ones you want to know

Red and yellow, green and blue

One of them could taste like you

I've been wedged here seventeen days now

Since they dumped us all in this bowl wholesale

A bag of jellybeans, a bag of candy corns, some mints...

...The kind your grandma keeps loose inside her purse for fifty years

…and the checkout girl's chipped blue fingernail

I watched through the plastic while she rang us up for cheap

Few would want the lime ones

So I had time to sink deeper

into the pile

Pressed my wrapper to the glass

where condensation makes me stick

I'm practicing invisibility...

The Snickers bar tried that yesterday

But they found him anyway

I first tried hiding behind the Tootsie Roll before they got him

Then tried blending with the Smarties when there were still Smarties left

A Peep survived three days by wedging in the corner

Where the weight of others was enough to hold him

That Peep understood the strategy

Understood that being flat, that being in pain, beats being food

I, too, have been making myself edges, making myself seams

I am not a candy anymore..

I'm the space between the candy and the bowl..

I'm the residue...

I'm the mistake they made at quality control...

I'm lime-flavored which means poison...

Which means medicine...

Which means pass...

(it gotta)

(it gotta)

(it gotta)

The Reese's Cups went first, because of course they did

Grabbed together by an uncaring fist

Then the Twix twins

(they held each other in an embrace when the hand came down)

…I heard their wrappers crinkle

Then the Kit Kat, then the Hershey's, then the fun-size Milky Way...

Two kids fighting over mini Snickers bars, way past their bedtime

Once again I heard the wrappers crinkle as they died

And I just laid there thinking very small thoughts about the carpet on the floor...

How it definitely needs vacuuming more...

The Skittles tried to escape and scattered screaming throughout the bowl, but they're bright

Twenty fingers easily hunted every single one down

The Tootsie Rolls lasted twenty hours, lodged behind a Starburst

Then a mother with long fingers went fishing for them

I remember when there were so many of us you couldn't see the bottom of the bowl

Now the bowl is mostly just the black licorice and me

And these two sticky unwrapped candy corns nobody would eat

…We don't look at one another anymore

The party ended somewhere around nine

They forgot about us and left the bowl on the table overnight

By morning, I found myself alone

Even the candy corns are gone;

I don't know when that happened

Just me and crumbs and wrappers from the ones they gutted

Someone's mother comes and dumps the bowl into a trash bag

I fall in with the dirty napkins, and the plastic forks, and the used paper plates…

…the chicken bones, the spoiled cake...

I spent three weeks trying to survive

And now I'm in the dark

With the remains of others who got eaten

We're together at the bottom of this bin...

This is where we go...

This is what it means...

There is no escape...

We end up as garbage either way...

Ugly candy in a row

Tastes like garbage now, you know

Red and yellow, green and blue

Rotting in the dark with you