by John Van Pelt.
1. The leavening sky.
2. Aunt Carol’s deep-dish ironware pie plate she had since Chicago days with a graying
chip off the rim and a capacity suggestive of doubling any modern recipe. Not that Carol
ever looked at a recipe, her hooked wrist and crabbed fingers dancing with impossible
deftness, scooping flour, sugar, dried beans, Sunday tea with a precision born in an
ethereous dimension of her muscle memory as the cat pestered her to be let at the mice
and the crickets in the evening damp.
3. I can’t get my head around
how flour is just ground-up grass seed,
the way everything is water and carbon,
the way our bodies bubble up from
and return to the earth.
4. The Love Language Food Dictionary,
especially the recipe on page 112
Wonderpan, Blessed Casserole of Omitted Cilantro.
5. What do you bake
in your poverty?
Which of your choreographies has become
more essential than rolled oats?
6. Swinging wild in a hundred painted cities,
flecks of seed in a core of creamy black gum,
worshiped in self-mortification, it’s so
troll the way vanilla has become
a symbol of safe sameness.
7. For your Americana, apple pie,
of course, but have on hand
log cabins and flintlocks and eagles
and a naivete that was never true.
8. Callow was I ere time eclipsed
Aunt Carol and her potato chips.
They called her at the last from their low
hiding place among the mixing bowls.
I missed her then, and ever since.
9. Measure for measure, each portion
hurls me through histories,
expeditions, trade routes, land grabs —
the crocks and the tins and the kilns overfill
and nothing can be subtracted.
Hail, the measure!
10. Poetry may seem to deal in ingredients
when you’re elbow deep.
It’s a truc.
Absolution comes only when
the ingredients are no more.
11. Cotton, hear. It caught on. Hemp, too.
Sugar cane. But King Cotton!
Can our barons’ Fifth Avenue finery
redeem the charade that was
everyone’s ticket
one way or another?
12. Cotton dish towels.
In the pantry.
Not poetry. Silly goose.
Compiled on the occasion of misreading a clickbait headline.