Category: Cooking

Posted on

Daughter, Home

    Pandemic 2020

Oh I wish for the irrational—
to have her here always,
not two thousand miles away where
her life is after college.
My heart croons a little to hear
her laughter from two floors away, when
I see the dinner table set for three and not two,
the dishwasher loaded with extra bowls
and flatware; when I have to remember
to buy the 1% not the skim milk this time;
when she asks can I please fry up some eggs
over-easy because she says she can never get them
just right; even when I blow it and the yolk breaks
and spills its bright gold all over the pan, to hear her say:
Thanks Mom, that is just fine, this is so good.

—Andrea Potos
 

From Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books, 2021). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Posted on

Cooking Class, Illinois, Mid 70s

Along her immaculate counter: silo
of red-handled sifter, bright order
of silver spoons, lemon bales of butter

softening in late winter light. In cupboards
her husband the carpenter built, bars
of Baker’s Chocolate, dried figs, quartered

apricots and Mason Jars of brined harvest.
A good cook puts up her hair, wears
apron, stores flour in freezer to keep

Boll Weevils out, uses shells of her egg
as a tool to separate yolk from white.
She also wears dresses, I learned

when, for donning jeans, she informed me
she no longer wished me to babysit. She cited,
over the phone to my mother, the effect

it might have on her son, the kind of wife
he might choose, the man he’d become
as I chased him on my hands and knees round

the living room’s glass table she refused to move
when he was born. He’d learn, she’d said, he’d learn
soon enough, where he stopped and she began.

— Tania Pryputniewicz, from Casual: A Little Book of Jeans Poems & Photos, T. S. Poetry Press

Posted on

On the Eve of Your Thirteenth Birthday

for Jeffrey

the last day of twelve
was nothing special,
you said.
you didn’t dress for gym,
didn’t play four-square with
the others. only walked,
you said.

In English, you wrote
a myth…about Gusano—
it means worm in Spanish
you said.
this Greco-Spanish
worm-god found freedom,
you said.
but he led his people
back into the
earth to rule the Underworld
and that’s why he will
be responsible for
the zombie apocalypse,
you said.

and math was about
interest, like money and
banks, you know?
you said.
and you have homework
so you came home in
a bad mood and didn’t
want to talk about twelve
you said.

so i hushed and got out
the eggs, cracked them one-by-
one in the bowl and mixed until
those yellow eyes are gone; i
rubbed grease on the pan that is
swathed in black enamel
from years of cradling sweet
batter…and i poured more
in. you at the table building
up interest when the room
starts to smell like a birthday.

and suddenly, you are there,
beside to lick the batter from
the bowl. what time was I
born?
you said.

—Laura Boggess, featured in The Joy of Poetry, T. S. Poetry Press