Have you ever had a cotton candy grape?
Maybe you picked them up
To fulfill a minimum,
To receive five percent off your groceries
Even though the grapes alone added seven.
Or maybe you picked them up
With the determination of a person who knows just what they want.

I was in the first category.
I welcomed the cotton candy orbs into my home,
My fridge,
And then…
I forgot them.
Beneath the shallots and the wilting dill.

But today, before a trip,
I dragged the bag of candy fruit
Out from the fridge.
With the care a deliman shows a pastrami-weighted hoagie,
I plopped the grapes into the sink.
I rinsed, and rinsed,
Then picked –
Just one.
For a mindless snack before a snack,
For water-soaked impatience,
For curiosity, somewhere.

And what burst out,
Like the pink of an August watermelon,
The water straight from a hose to a water balloon,
The balloon a clown folds into a weiner dog…

Was cotton candy.
Sugar crystals helixed together into something both neon and delicate,
artificial and earthly.
Perfectly twirled,
Still warm from some carnival machine inside the grape.

How the fuck did someone do that? I wondered,
Not ever wanting to know the real answer.

I prefer instead
The image of the clowns they hired to inject each grape with sucrose.
An assembly line of clowns, in some factory, somewhere,
Rainbow hair in nets to abide by the FDA.

Or the image of the bored magician,
Who snuck into the supermarket,
And replaced this masterpiece under the illusion of fruit,
Determined to subvert the foolish adults
Who insist on grapes in lunchboxes instead of Gushers.

Or maybe it was the supermarket grape scientist,
(They have those, don’t they?)
Who wondered if they made the right choice in life.
To choose a life of lab coats and the pursuit of knowledge rather than one of wonder and play.
Perhaps this humble grape was a quiet resistance,
To a world that told them they could not have both.

But no matter the mastermind behind this grape,
Or how much they made my Thursday by inventing it,
There in my kitchen,
I decided I did not want to have another.
I didn’t want to pop the clown’s balloon or halt the magician’s trick.
The longer I ate, the more I’d know,
That a grape is just a grape,
And there are some things I prefer not to remember today.