Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 25-27
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
- Dude—this speaker has a particular skill for coming up with cool ways to describe the caps of mushrooms. We've had noses, toes, fists, hammers, rams, and now... shelves and tables. We wonder how this lines up with our whole theory that the mushrooms represent women.
- Oh, wait, we get it. Shelves and tables are common things you'd see in any household. So that also describes the housewives of the 1950s.
- Like the stereotypical housewife, tables and shelves aren't really noticed. They're just expected to be there to support and carry the weight of the household, without grumbling about it.
- Wow, the speaker gets a little dark here when she describes the mushrooms as edible. If we're taking this mushrooms = women thing through, here, then she seems to be saying that women can be totally consumed by men. Men can completely dominate them and use them for everything that they, are if they so choose. That sounds pretty awful if you ask us.