March 2021
Bio Note: Like everyone else, I’ve been affected by the pandemic, but it has only deepened
my appreciation for poetry. I’ve been looking back at previous poems to see what approaches I’ve tried.
My poems have appeared recently in Southern Poetry Review and The American Journal of Poetry.
In My Mother’s Kitchen
Everything sizzled: hearts, breasts, thighs shimmied in hot fat. Her breading a cloak that could glamorize the meanest cut. Talk sizzled, too, peppered with tales, puns diatribes, and jokes. On the stove, a tin of grease clouded as conversation aged with whiskey and saved to heat up over and over like arguments. Re-hashed events simmered on a flame that could flare in a moment. She called the crusted iron skillet seasoned and liked its heft— though she never lifted it against my father, preferring sarcasm’s razor edge. My father Ham-fist, Scorching Tongue, who still might stir a pot or wash a dish. In that small kitchen, barely room to embrace or box-step or box, their love and rancor danced like water on a hot griddle and rose to steam that still can cloud my sight.Author's Note: My mother was such a wonderful cook that I was too intimidated to learn from her. I remember so much of our family life taking place in a kitchen steamy with love and conflict.
Originally published in World Enough, and Time (Kelsay Books, 2017)
Deadeye: A Photo of Myself, Age Five
Except for one stray lock, the girl has tucked her hair beneath the cowboy hat and stands face front to the camera, her legs spread slightly, feet in her Roy Rogers boots toed out. Hands on hips, she stares straight at me, squints one eye as if taking a bead even before she whips the six-gun from its holster. Deadeye, her father called her. That loaded gaze which says, There's not room in this town for both of us. She looks invincible, bound to increase her legend. Once at naptime she left her sleeping mother, pulled a dining room chair to the door, and still unable to reach the three chain locks, piled telephone books slippery back to back to hoist herself up. An outlaw of bone and wiry muscle, they can't make her eat, not even her mother's famous fried chicken, except for the golden crisp crust. She knows what whets her own appetite, wants to dig her spurs into the world's curved side and break it. Clear out by sundown, those eyes warn me. Nothing symmetrical about her, all odd angles and furious intention. The near-smile cocked and boasting, I see right through you, though she can't, of course, see me at all, my sardonic smile, my squint at her threat: You'll never get away with this.Author's Note: Though I was a quiet kid, I was a little rebel. I wish I was still as feisty as that cowgirl.
Originally published in World Enough, and Time (Kelsay Books, 2017)
©2021 Mary Makofske
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