The Marshmallow Test | Philip Granof
To predict adulthood
a little boy or a little girl,
Or something tbd,
placed before a single
marshmallow
is told,
not too kindly
and not too harshly
“Do not eat this until
I come back,
and you’ll get two.”
If you were my marshmallow
I would have snatched you up and run,
spilling tables and chairs,
shattering their plate,
past security,
behind the building.
Tsk, they’d say,
“That was the worst one yet.”
Holding my prize to my chest in cupped hands
I’d smile a Cheshire cat smile,
a lunar smile,
knowing they could have offered me a million more
but this is the only one I ever wanted —
My hot
pink
marshmallow.
Philip Granof was born in Hollywood, California — in what is now the painted blue Church of Scientology's world headquarters — and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and performs regularly at the Cantab Lounge and the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. He brings to his poetry what only thirty-five years in corporate America can: an eye for the absurd and an ear for the elegiac.