Kuchisabishii is a Japanese word whose meaning is best described as eating not from hunger but because your mouth is lonely. For instance, you've just had dinner but can't settle down with a book or crossword. Rain is falling on the roof but sleep eludes you again— tonight it's disappeared into the pantry, so you rummage among boxes of wheat crackers and tinned sardines, a bag of gummi worms left over from Halloween (your mouth is not that lonely). Perhaps it wants a cold leaf of ice from the freezer, a scoop speckled with vanilla bean. The mouth is a door to a hundred hungers, none of which you really understand anymore. One door is stress eating; another, grief eating. There are eating-after-bad-breakups scenes in the movies, and eating from a surfeit of joy. There was eating through long months of isolation: one cracked pumpkin seed at a time, and night after night soaked in hot chili oil washed down with milk.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.