11 ways to enjoy an overly ripe girlfriend | Megan Cannella
1. You’re going to say no because it’s a texture thing, but have you considered sauteing me with some onions. The onions will mask my taste, and you won’t have to think of the times you liked kissing, or licking, or biting me.
2. If people use avocados to make brownies, certainly I, too, could be a brownie ingredient. But I did hear once that avocados taste like clean dick. I’m not sure you’d want whatever version of dick I taste like in your brownies. It’s not clean. That much I’m certain of.
3. Like...I don’t mean to brag, but I could be a pie, and I think that I’d make a delightful pie.
4. Leave me on the front porch til Halloween and maybe a neighborhood kid will come and stomp me to death, and your hands will be just as clean and just as complicit as they were ever going to be. You are never going to be avocado dick clean, so I don’t know why you’d even pretend like you are trying to be.
5. Let me grow a cozy blanket of mold. If you won’t snuggle me, why would you begrudge me growing my own blanket? Truly, why wouldn’t you? You don’t get an overly ripe girlfriend without a good dose of begrudging.
6. Throw me in the blender with the other almost off produce on your counter. If you’d put us in the fridge to begin with, some of us would have fared better. Things would have moved more slowly, less intensely. I wouldn’t be dying in front of you now. You wouldn’t be struggling to find something to do with my decay. But don’t think this smoothie can be too fancy. Just uncomfortable softness and some tap water. Gulp me down.
7. Choke on me.
8. Take me to work. Leave me in the fridge. Unlabeled. Hope someone mistakes me for their own and chokes on our misery. Smile smugly when they call out sick with food poisoning. Look how well you dodged that.
9. Choke on me.
10. Follow the advice of lifestyle icon, Real Housewife of New York, Sonja Morgan, and cook me in a toaster oven. This would let me know that you really learned something from our time together--that Sonja is smarter than people give her credit for. If my legacy fortifies Sonja, fuck yeah--fire up that toaster oven! Make yourself a nice, flakey piece of salmon while you’re at it. If you build your foil boats just right, you can fit us both in the toaster oven at the same time.
11. Spread me on toast. Choke on the last crumb that you could easily wash down with the tiniest sip of water, if only the water wasn’t in my name and I hadn’t already turned it off. In preparation.
Megan Cannella (she/they) is a neurodivergent Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. Her chapbooks, I Redact You, Too (Alien Buddha Press 2022) and Confrontational Crotch and Other Real Housewives Musings (Daily Drunk Press 2021), are out now and available at https://linktr.ee/mcannella. Her chapbook Eldest Daughter: A Break-up Story is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. You can find Megan on Twitter at @megancannella.