Marianne Szlyk

Food Is Love

 

This afternoon you offer me

the rest of the mochi.

You compel; no, you encourage;

no, you decline

to take the last three

deflated mock-eggs

runny with tangy mango

and sweet ice cream.

 

I remember the last time

I brought you food:

chocolate in the shape

of an evil eye

that could not ward off

my racing heart

or your migraines.

 

Chocolate tastes

like ashes to us now.

 

I recall the last time

I cooked for you:

salmon top heavy with orange slices

and sloshed with mojo criollo

from the Puerto Rican grocery store

that’s been closed for ten years;

angel-hair pasta with walnuts,

olives, flecks of red pepper;

cinnamon and chocolate gelato

for dessert.

 

In some other kitchen,

I chanted food is love

food is love food is love.

 

Originally published in Verse-Virtual, August 2020

 

Tonic

 

Chiefly Eastern New England: soda pop. 

 

Morning thunderstorms keep us home,
away from swimming lessons and
the round of suburban errands. 
Heavy, buggy clouds rumble;
lightning flashes beyond the pines.

Yesterday’s humidity still clutches at us.

 

My mother sends my brother
to the basement to shut off
the electricity.  The fan sputters,
then dies.  We listen
to a transistor radio. 
Jagged static interrupts
last summer’s soft rock hits. 
I sneak diet ginger ale
before it is tepid and flat.
 

Next summer I’ll be working
for my father in the city
in the air-conditioned,
windowless office
on Dorchester Avenue.
Drinking icy cans of Pepsi
from the corner store,
listening to the Providence station,

I will imagine summer in Seekonk.
It blazes with classic rock
and feels as smooth as coconut oil
while storms keep my brother
and my mother home.

 

Originally published in The Wild Word

 

 

At the Café Algiers, Cambridge, MA, Closed 2017

 

Amelia will never stop there now,

not after Sundays at the movies,

not after the Tuesday night Polish lessons

she always intends to sign up for.

 

Her family’s strange consonants

will never prickle her mouth. 

She will never soothe herself

with honeyed mint tea and yogurt.

 

True, she went to the cafe once

with a friend and the man

she was sort of seeing.

They were all going to visit

the real Harvard Square,

 

not the movie theater

which by then was showing

candy-colored comedies,

the sorts of films you could see

at any multiplex by the mall,

 

not the ice cream parlor

with thirty-one flavors of chocolate,

from dark mint to mocha

caliente chocolate to cherry chip--        

the place where she always stopped.

 

She remembers waiting, not talking

at the Café Algiers.  He was

telling them about pranks he pulled

at the other college, the one

two subway stops away. 

 

No server ever came, 

but that didn’t matter.

She was trying to impress

her friends that love,

to her, was food.