You force-feed him out of love.
Food is life, after all.
But he resists
clamps his mouth shut
rejects it.
Perhaps he doesn’t want
to be forced
any more.
Perhaps his time has come
to
s l o w l y
withdraw . . .
from food
from you
from
life
Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli’s novel La Brigantessa (Inanna, 2018) won Gold for Historical Fiction in the 2019 IPPY Award.
