poetry by Laura Maher
The Cookbook
If I choose to fall into a crisis when I find
The Joy of Cooking open on the counter
to a page on which I have not prepared
any of the recipes, or, that the recipes
before or after have also not been made
precisely enough for leftovers to leave in
the fridge, then don’t worry. Sometimes
I feel ashamed that I am not dying today,
so I might invent dangers, and suffering,
and look for God, or the absence of,
in kitchens, in recipes, in the constant
low hum of appliances. I am not the kind
of woman who can pull saffron from her
cabinets, but I still want to eat well. And
to feel known. Even when I know the crisis
will come, walking into the kitchen, I want
the heavy pages of a cookbook, so much joy.
Memo
Regarding your last visit to me—the evening when we drank cups of coffee
with cinnamon so that when I returned home I could not sleep for hours;
my hair smelled of smoke and my wrist felt so empty, without your hand
wrapping around it, testing to see just how fragile my bones really were;
my lips burned by spice or by silence, so I didn’t dare even whisper;
how the moonlight came in like scars and the green hum of spring turning
to summer rose beyond it all—you were kind to notice I changed my hair,
though I hadn’t.
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