Four Poems
Poetry by Linda Derezinski
Friday Night: Potato Chips
Crumbs collect on my chest,
I sink into the February sofa and exhale.
My fingers, greasy, smear ovals
On the pages of my library book.
Tomorrow I will drive the kid to skating lessons.
I will buy salad greens
And load the dishwasher.
Tonight I suck my oily fingers;
Salt tickles and burns the edges of my tongue.
I lick the bits from the bottom of the bag.
And remember kissing you in the car:
Leaning over the E-brake,
Summer night air sloppy,
Your neck briny from the beach,
My tongue so soft in my own mouth.
Burned Toast
School mornings, in dim breakfast light,
we drifted to the linoleum kitchen table.
Dad anchored us, rescuing his breakfast
when the toast had gone awry.
He’d trim the blackened corners
and scrape down the surface,
never knew a burn he couldn't salvage,
as dust accumulated on his plate.
He left little black crumbs in the butter dish,
slathering his scraped-down toast,
pulling a face to convince us it was delicious.
With jam, maybe it was.
No matter if we opened all the windows;
for the next hour or so,
everything we ate in this kitchen
was slightly redolent of burned toast.
Even my toast, unburned, pristine,
tasted a little of char. I ate.
Together we could shoulder the weight;
blackened burden lightened, buttered.
Nana Teaches Me How to Make Clam Chowder
Before we set out to cook, the carnage has to happen.
Clams dug by moonlight low tide.
Barefoot, pant legs rolled,
We wade in and shovel them with our toes:
Sand, greasy black silt,
yields a qhahog as big as my fist.
I wake to the briny, muddy smell of clams,
scrubbed, de-sanded, steaming.
As I stumble in the kitchen
Searching for a glass of orange juice,
Nana peers in to check if they have opened,
The steam clouds her glasses
and weighs down her feather-light white hair.
Together, we strip the clams down
Yank their necks clear,
So they can be chopped small.
It’s my job to scrub the wooden cutting board,
And I watch black clam viscera and green clam ooze
Circle down the sink.
Late afternoon, it begins:
Bacon in the pan renders fragrant,
Laid out to crisp on grocery bags under paper towels.
Nana’s big-knuckled hands chop onions,
She sweeps them right into the bacon fat
To sweat until they surrender everything allium
To sweetness and softness.
The heft of the soup: potatoes.
Grey-brown, deeply lumpy, unfussy.
Roots that remember the rocky Maine dirt
they were pulled from.
We dig out the eyes, peel and dice, until
They form a neat matte pile of dull cubes.
Last, we lavish the milk, two glass bottles,
to cover the rest like a blanket.
We put the chowder to bed.
When Laura rings the supper bell,
We lay out eight bowls.
Center a pat of butter in each,
Ladle hot soup over top,
And crown the bowl with a crumble of bacon.
What Nana passed down:
a lifetime of practice,
pride masquerading as Baptist humility,
a proper chowder.
Tuesday, Dinner
Before the scarred cutting board, I stand ready
to coerce a meal from scraps and bits:
this lonely wilted carrot, this soft celery
yearn to release sweetness for butter and heat.
On the counter, knifed leeks
illuminate the air with their clean scent.
pepper’s thorny danger,
the funk of garlic
persuaded to mellow;
a plump chicken thigh nuzzles in.
The aroma frees my tongue.
I want to lick every surface in this kitchen.
Even the bitterness of turnip
can be chopped into submission,
tamed to delicious.
On the windowsill
in a little white dish,
a red persimmon bows out, its flesh cradled.
It needs nothing from me.
I only await its insouciant slump into ooze,
and scoop its fibrous, floral surge.
BIO: Linda is a teacher and literature scholar, a mother, a singer, a gardener and an avid home cook. Although her prose has been published online at various educational institutions, she is a new poet and is enjoying her newly-hatched status.