The Business of Feeding People (with Cherries)
you do not eat that which rips your heart with joy. –Tom Lux
Thinking deeply about the needs
of the audience, the audience being
whom you will be feeding, what
concerns about their bodies, their
chemistry, their hearts, and mind
mind you, because that matters,
as well, the habits and pleasures
of accustomed tastes and textures
mattering, you must try to appeal
to that, some level of gastronomic
aesthetic.
Then...
there is the planning
and the purchasing, the grocery
stores you go for different ingredients
and bulk items, or some just enough
for only one meal and how to organize,
how to make sure you have bags ready,
or you will leave with armfuls heavy
and precariously balances, a jumble
in the back hatch of your vehicle,
a sloppy mess, maybe broken eggs
or jars because you forgot transport
matters.
Gathering...
bags, coolers, boxes,
the packaging needed to get things
from stores to the home place
where you must then sort, stack,
combine, date, and commit
to memory regarding the menus
and dates and numbers of meals
needed and for whom and what
their nutritional issues are and also
and also their tiny desires, humble
as a jar of maraschino cherries in
wait.
Or that brand...
of root beer or type
of onion he likes, you will slice
thin to top his favorite sandwiches,
the ones he is not allowed to eat,
yet any one might be the last, and
who would deny him this pleasure?
This, too, is part of your job: when
to and the when not to; you decide
which is more important, his health
or last pleasures, some modicum
of joy.
Reusable
The wages of dying is love. –Galway Kinnell
Trying to be a good citizen, you save
and carry bags everywhere, storing
them in cabinets, drawers, closets. When
you come in from shopping, it’s hard
to remember to put them in your car,
and next time you come out of Trader
Joe's with your arms clumsily cradling
as a basket the big sunhat you found
in the car in the backseat under a towel
from the summer the last time you got
to a beach, and you fill it with limes
and lemons and a jar or two of things
you felt you could not find at Wegmans
or Lidl's or Acme or ShopRite, all of which
are within a 5 mile radius, all of which you
go to for different things at different times
all of which feel like a gauntlet; those bags
are all jumbled into drawers and cupboards
and closets along with all the glass jars you
have washed and saved, peeled off the labels
and scraped the residue off of, so you could
cook healthy things and store them in glass
to avoid leaching chemicals from plastics;
you are trying to keep everyone alive.
You are
trying to keep everyone healthy. Oh, you try,
but fail. They get sick, repeatedly. Some die.
All will, sometime, and none of it can you
stave off.
Oh, the wages of dying. No amount
of love seems to save anybody,
and some days
it feels as if the price
of love
is the dying.
Laura McCullough's last book, WOMEN & OTHER HOSTAGES was out last year, her 6th or 7th. Others included The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Contest, University of Arkansas Press, Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP) , Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (Georgia University Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, Guernica, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Pank, Hotel America, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines.