Rutabagas, incandescent. Golden turnips, soft as flesh. Caramelized carrots, parsnips roasted and crisp.

She chooses to remember the vegetables sliced and seasoned by her grandmother’s hands, translucent as Vidalias.

The rest of her roots, she knows, belong mangled in the disposal. Feeble skins and rotting corpses, bitter fennel, putrid beets.

Joree is an anti-poverty advocate who moonlights as a writer when she’s not recovering from putting her toddler to bed.