This five-poem cycle was debuted tonight at Gigi's Cafe in Minneapolis, MN (thank you, Eric! #MNYFP) and The White House in Fayetteville, WV (thank you, Garnet! #RDpoets).
For my second birthday, my mother stacked bagels
into a pyramid and lit a candle.
My aunt and uncle glanced
at each other.
I grasped and cooed
at my first flickering food.
When I was old enough to balance on a chair,
I stood at the counter next to my mother as she
turned and folded,
turned and folded
nascent bread.
My hands worked, too,
on a knob, brown and hard.
She divided her mass of dough, all curves, into four,
and tucked the soft edges under.
We greased our pans—
wide and accommodating for her, a narrow box for me—
and tapped flour across the bottom, the sides.
Her loaves sprang in the oven.
Mine were obstinate,
until I developed the patience to follow the recipe exactly, to
turn and fold,
turn and fold.
I knew cow’s milk belonged in my diet
the same way I knew I would go to a liberal arts college—
from context and culture.
In America’s dairyland, sheltered by the Lawrence Bubble,
I ran with Russian
and lounged with Linguistics.
Then one sunny spring afternoon,
I stepped into the dark.
The Lawrence University Vegans and Vegetarians were screening Eat:
Giggles from the back row when rhetoric leapt,
but hush when furtive footage rolled.
My cognitive construct of Milk
curdled.
I stepped out of the dark, the bubble—
burst.
How could I cipher Cyrillic, compare conjugations
in this savage light and sharp air?
I made curt changes,
homemade soy milk for cow’s milk,
coconut oil for butter,
sorbet for ice cream,
and on and on.
Ossified academia lumbered along—
I semestered in Russia:
my brain in St. Petersburg, my belly in Minnesota,
and delectable dairy products in my face:
smetana, tvorog, syrok.
Russia, like so many kefir grains,
fermented the familiar to a
teeming,
complex
tang.
One thing broke me;
two built me back.
Fall in FScN 4612, Human Nutrition,
each lecture softening the edges of my circumscribed truth.
Studies strive for stolid statements,
but humans refuse to cooperate.
We fictionalize what we ate yesterday,
we guess at how often we eat fish,
we tick the same box for grass-fed beef,
for venison,
for McDonald’s Hamburgers.
I crumbled under the weight of peer-reviewed articles,
at odds with each other,
squinting their way to the truth.
Winter, and I watched a dietitian speak with precise passion
of an ecological approach to food and health,
of environmental health and natural resources,
of starting with oneself.
Essential building blocks condensed
into a strand stretching
from a protein machine, bending and twisting
into a tertiary structure,
The Food System.
Summer, and I was swept along on a sustainability safari:
landing in locations
from labels off co-op shelves,
scuffling with scripts
from scholars and scientists,
facing furrowed facts
from farmers and foragers.
Now, feet planted in soil,
eyes raised to the sun,
I throw my arms open to complexity.
Vegetables
The anorexic client’s favorite tallies
are vegetables.
The anorexic client’s favorite colors
are black and white.
I watch the clients serve themselves.
“That’s enough salad,” I say to one
and she glares at me.
Here, dessert is more important than vegetables,
and clients purse their lips at it,
wishing one of them would disappear.
Here is the bitter pill to swallow:
there is no black and white.
Only a magnificent muddle of color.
A child with her first fig
Doesn’t know what the seeds look like
Until she has ripped open the skin.
I labored four years eating from the tree of knowledge,
facing bracing questions,
planting enchanting answers.
I rested two days with a dietitian turned farmer,
who sat on a hay bale and recalled with remorse the advice she once gave patients,
who stood by a fire and wept over the death of her son.
She planted rows and rows of trees for him, the fruit of her land.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
how does your orchard grow?
