In your kitchen
I perch and starve
like gray slate
on cataract-blue counter,
you swallow black coffee,
the stove sizzles between us,
great-grandma’s meatballs
simmer like midnight sun.
This March has been cold,
ghostly snow falls, deaf white
clumps under streetlight.
When we speak, we speak
like hollow shells, blood
rushing becomes half language
sailed back and forth,
back and forth, no shore
to speak of. I try to forget
ivy stricken walls, frozen milk,
lungs inflamed with welt-red silence.
As you talk, the wooden spoon
turns in the pot with agitation.
You’ve seen a specialist
about an imaginary room
for your former lives.
You tell me about the process
of making it beautiful.
You use the word restful repeatedly
as if the room were your mistakes’
bucolic retreat,
equipped with antique salt shakers,
new white couch,
organized photo albums, clean
cookbooks, quilts begging to replace
your memory: today’s antitheses.
The spoon rests now, your voice
pushing forward in hushed tones,
pushing you to the soft warm bank
of a clay future.
