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The Last Time I Fried a Chicken


The last time I fried a chicken,
baked home-made biscuits
with rolled-out dough
dusted with flour, cut
in circles with a jelly jar glass
The last time I fried a chicken
baked home-made biscuits
made creamy white gravy
from flour browned in grease
from Crisco fried chicken
milk added slowly
the other hand stirring
so no lumps form
The last time I fried a chicken
soaking pieces in a buttermilk
bath, dredging in flour
salt and pepper in a grocery
store bag, shaking each breast,
leg and thigh, then letting
them rest while Crisco
melts to sizzle in the cast iron
skillet, a gift from my Mimi
The last time I fried a chicken
baked home-made biscuits
made creamy pan gravy
His father came to dinner
woke up our babies
got them screaming and crying
asked, “What’s  your problem?”
My own face hotter than Crisco
the last time I fried a chicken.





Beans


Because his mother always
burns the beans
I am careful not to; but once
distracted by the babies at my feet
I let the pot run dry.
Slender fingers of green
ruin to brown with a minute’s
inattention, but I refuse defeat
scrape the beans onto his plate
next to meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
He rolls his eyes
and I gather steam, become
the door-to-door salesman of supper:
They are supposed to look that way!
Burn-aise sauce, it’s French, I say.
I saw the recipe on TV, or read it in a book.
Lies tumble from my lips like crumbs
and I invoke the saints of good cuisine:
Julia Child, Betty Crocker, Sara Lee,
so burned to a crisp am I by the thought
of doing wrong and getting caught.





In the First Years


I don’t know exactly what he does all day,
my fresh-pressed engineer
how his slide-rule calculates
movement buried in the passageways
of pipes and tanks.
He uses words like
volatile, effluent, pressure.

But, I know what I do
rumpled mommy of two,
in a neighborhood so strange
I think it dangerous to stroll them to the park
alone. Mostly, I stay home
and wash piles of laundry
I never sort or fold,
cook food that doesn’t taste quite right,
although I won’t admit
nothing’s ever really good.

Sometimes I drive him to work
when I want the car to visit
my mother in the valley.
The refinery air is sulfurous
and thick, it makes the babies
in the back-seat gag, get sick,
vomit with such force they splatter my back
with flecks of puke, so I never
come entirely clean.

We go back after dusk
to pick him up.
The air still stinks, but the tanks
light up like Christmas.
In a couple of years the plant explodes
leaving a co-worker dead.
And, I will throw a plate of spaghetti
a whisper from my husband’s head.
But in the first years, no notion
of what comes after— 
the fragile welds that held us
a match strike from disaster.


Three poems from The Congress of Luminous Bodies, Aortic Books, 2013