Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley (e book free reading txt) 📗

shirt—

1990. In 1991,

I pick up the calendar she kept

by her reading chair. Her neat script fills the square of

January 22:

Carl died. Life is over.

The woman in green jacket and green skirt, full throttle,

smiles toward the camera

as she rounds the corner of the terminal,

purse under one arm and blue carry-on under the other.

Because this photograph is not mine to keep, I take

a photograph of it.

Barthes says I am now operator

and referent,

sliver of thumb and palm visibly cradling Kodak print.

The rest of January 1991 stays blank.

February, blank. March, bare.

But then a church meeting is scheduled.

She pencils in a lunch.

Yes, she will come to the recital.

Her cursive wakens the days.

Even in winter, the garden can call itself to bloom.

CARD TABLE

A practical gift for moving to the city:

good cherry squared around black vinyl,

four long legs that fold within itself

as a greyhound does, disappearing into a nap.

Just big enough for a bridge match

if I’d ever had four people willing to kiss knees.

Just big enough to let me call a corner

of that S Street studio my breakfast nook,

stacked with a week’s worth of newspapers

while I ate cereal cross-legged on my futon.

Just big enough to pull out every few years

and complain how small the table was,

too crowded as a desk, too low for my chairs.

In January, we stared at the strange space

wedged between two kitchen doorways.

Might as well try the card table.

We stacked onions there, then potatoes,

then tomatoes and peaches, and it became

the chopping table; stirring table; serving table.

Now, the first morning she is gone,

I see a swipe in the vinyl where a hot dish

burned through, and realize I forgot

to ask for anything—a ring, her sheet music—

so what I have is this reminder

that she, too, was once a girl in a city,

and that she knew I’d always need a table.

IN PRAISE OF PINTOS

Phaseolus vulgaris.

Forgive these mottled punks,

children burst

from the piñata of the New World,

and their ridiculous names

of Lariat, Kodiak, Othello,

Burke, Sierra, Maverick.

Forgive these rapscallions that

would fill the hot tub with ham

while their parents

go away for the weekend,

just to soak in that salt.

Forgive their climbing instinct.

Forgive their ignorance

of their grandparents who

ennobled Rome’s greatest:

Fabius, Lentulus, Pisa, Cicero

the chickpea. Legume

is the enclosure, fruit in pod,

but pulse is the seed.

From the Latin, puls

is to beat, to mash, to throb.

Forgive that thirst. Forgive

that gallop. Beans are the promise

of outlasting the coldest season.

They are a wink in the palm of God.

THE VOW

But never for us the flitch of bacon though,

That some may win in Essex at Dunmow.

So promises the old wives’ tale,

a covenant according to Chaucer:

that if tomorrow I trek to Dunmow Church

and swear before God and congregation

not a fight, no single quarrel,

in 366 days not even once wishing

to be un-married to you,

that hog is ours for the taking.

My love, what

limp victory that would be,

sweet silence of perfect agreement

as we swing a pork trophy between us,

walking the many miles home—

the fatback won, the battle lost.

I reserve my right to a good spat,

to the meat’s spit in flame.

I take joy in choosing you again and again.

LITTLE LOVE POEM

The 6 a.m. sun considers everything,

humming its way past the Capitol.

I reheat yesterday’s coffee,

put lima beans into a pot:

Fordhook, always Fordhook,

drizzle of olive oil, pinch of salt, shake

of chili flakes. The chicken broth

comes to boil for a minute

before I cover, simmer. Soon he’ll wake,

and I’ll ask him to put a record on,

something with no words;

bowls, spoons, a single twist of pepper.

DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

A man wants my take on his novel

where a wife dies with a peanut in her mouth

after we’ve met her husband, in the act with his secretary

in the passenger seat of a late-life convertible.

A man wants my take on his novel

where the husband’s marital issues are solved

by her anaphylactic collapse after he serves her takeout

spiked with a cashew, and for another 300 pages

he wonders, Was it an accident? Or did I

know? Somewhere out there a man

is writing a novel about a chef with a taste

for adding shrimp paste to curry and his unsuspecting

shellfish-allergic wife, and I will be asked

for my take on it. I have been offered dozens of takes

on my own death. Suggestions abound.

Death by ice cream. Death by cake. Death by cucumber,

though that would take a while;

perhaps gazpacho as a shortcut. Death by mango.

Death by Spanish omelette. Death by dairy,

an abstraction sexy to someone who has never side-eyed

cream brought out slopping toward the coffee;

who has never felt histamine’s palm at her throat,

who says Cheese makes life worth living.

These wives! I get you, women who

did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device.

We almost die a lot. Or: we die a lot,

almost. We’re over it. Our mouths have more to say.

AN ACCOMMODATION

Pistachio’s buds of salt-funk;

cayenne macramé of boiled crawfish;

cantaloupe’s tacky, thin sugar;

the first time I eat a thing

I can eat anything.

The allergy requires initial exposure

before my mast cells gather,

before my body says No.

Let’s consider your need to center me

on the table, to call my portion

naked or plain while offering

others the “real” version.

Let’s examine your suggestion

we put warnings on the cabinets,

attach my name to a list.

First time, I tasted

a kind of kindness. Then

came my second reckoning.

INTERSECTIONALITY

In the diagram, Bob

is a striped blue triangle.

Some people do not like Bob.

Down with stripes.

Down with triangles.

Bob is at the intersection of

stripey-ness and blue-ness,

of triangle-ness and Bob-ness.

Luckily, there are “liberation groups.”

Here is where the model

starts to fail me: maybe liberation

has come in the form of four taxis,

each waiting to carry Bob away

from this intersection.

Bob should not have to choose

any one taxi, I am told.

Or maybe Bob does not

want to go? Bob has noticed

the quality of the bodega’s coffee.

Bob likes this intersection.

Bob can get a pretty good deal

on buying a one-bedroom.

Bob is a striped blue triangle.

Bob is a damn gentrifier.

In 1995, I flunked