"Moist" - A Poem about a Much Maligned Word

“Moist” by Amber Counts

In class, we were talking
About words we hate.
I heard a familiar term,
A repeat offender,
That seems to make everyone
Cringe:
Moist.
Don’t believe me?
Say it.
In a room full of people,
Ask how they feel
About “moist.”
Some will wince;
Others will feel motivated
To exclaim in protest.
Someone almost always
Says “that’s gross”
Or “that sounds nasty!”
But I always counter,
Don’t you want your cake
To be moist?
This invariably begins a debate.
What else could we call
Moist cake
But moist cake?
Wet cake? Ew.
Soggy cake? Not appealing.
Juicy cake?
I’m not even sure where to start
With how wrong that is.
Steaks can be juicy:
Cakes cannot.
So what do we use
Instead of moist?
Wet, damp, humid
Tearful, watery, dewy
Misty, rainy, steamy
Muggy, clammy, dank
Soggy, sweaty, sticky –
None of these sound
Like they would be good
For a cake.

Fun fact:
According to an article
By The New Yorker,
The more disgust one associates
With functions of the human body,
The more that person
Displays an aversion
To “moist.”
It’s good to know that those of us
Who enjoy a healthy relationship
With our bodies
Can have our moist cake
And eat it, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Station Eleven - a Review (With Spoilers!)

Image
Warning: plot spoilers ahead... It's funny. Sometimes, the films and books I enjoy the most are the ones that I initially approached with hesitancy or ambivalence. Having recently finished the second book in a row for our book club that I found merely mildly entertaining, I had no real hopes for Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven , which I had not even heard of prior to the suggestion by one of our club members. With no expectations in mind, I skimmed the comments on the back cover and inside flap, but they didn't give much away. Thus, I started reading with almost no information about the book, its author, or even its genre. I knew it was post-apocalyptic, but was it dystopian? Was it similar to Cormac McCarthy's The Road ? Would it feature a teen love story as depicted in both  The Hunger Games trilogy and the Divergent series? I had several post-apocalyptic stories in mind as I began to read; boy was I surprised to find one that was different! Typically, aut
Read more

Prayer to the Teachers to Forgive them for Solely Using TPCASTT

Last year, I began moving away from the formulaic TPCASTT and Somebody-Wanted-But-So methods of poetry analysis in my AP course. I still teach those methods of analysis; any tools my students have for decoding poems that serve as potential pathways toward understanding are valuable, and I want them to have as many tools as possible! However, I found that by emulating mentor texts, my students were able to find all of the poetic devices and reach a deeper understanding of the author’s work. This is simply a natural by-product of analyzing which parts of the poem – diction, syntax, theme, repetition and other devices – that they would like to mimic in their own work. My students came up with some of the most beautiful and deeply personal work I’ve ever experienced – some of which they performed at a poetry slam that they organized at the end of the year. To that end, tomorrow we will read “Forgive My Guilt” by Robert P. Tristram Coffin and “Prayer to the Living to Forgive them for B
Read more