EMILY CHAFFINS

Ars Poetica with Food Coloring

You are eating ice cream, of course!  
The splash of playground-slide-blue  
and plastic-toy-red is sticky on your
mouth. Your hand navigating the spoon  
is unsteady. You are still learning to eat as you are
still learning to use soft crayons to feed that other
hunger: you’re already writing stories. 
 
You think a cold scoop of food coloring
is Shakespeare. Don’t worry, 
my smile is not a bully’s smirk. 
I’m grinning like a mother who 
tastes the first lopsided cake  
she and her child made together,  
gazing at the “Happy birthday” 
drawn in squiggly red frosting 
with indescribable warmth. 
 
If the glow you feel after drawing  
the circle on a “b” in just the right spot 
feels like fire, tastes  
like sugar, just 
wait. 
Later you will read about John’s revelatory scroll 
that goes down bitter but tastes like honey, and
you will realize: 
all other sugars are bitter in comparison, 
even amid your stomach’s turmoil. 
 
What I want to say is, punctuation can be more 
than sticky splashes 
of ink. A period can be a cocoon. 
You’ve seen them in the butterfly garden at school: 
living things waiting – 
in inner upheaval – 
to bring forth wings in a fiery flash.  

Emily Chaffins is a Cuban American fiction writer and poet who has been honored with multiple awards, including First Place for Undergraduate Fiction in the Florida International University Student Literary Awards and a Silver Key Award in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (Humor Category). Her forthcoming short story “Raspberry Cordial” will be released in issue 29.1 of The Windhover August 2025. She is an MFA student in Florida International University's Creative Writing program. Besides writing, she enjoys singing at church, cooking and baking with her family, and reading really big books. Follow her on Instagram @the.smallest_things.