Back to Issue Forty-Four

Ingredients

BY RAGE HEZEKIAH

I’ve broken three brooms
in our marriage—
gripping the stick

to force dirt & dust
motes into order. My fists
have milked cows,

excavated potatoes,
kneaded countless
loaves of bread.

Carpal tunnel pains me
while knitting, pulling
tiny stitches taut. Yesterday

I planned to make Thai chicken
in the crockpot, defrosted
meat, bought lemongrass,

basil & limes. Then
Liliane died & we drove
to New York midweek.

I dumped four pounds
of thighs into the ceramic vessel,
poured in paprika, cumin

& cayenne, a dose
of local barbeque sauce.
On Tuesday they harvested

six eggs from my body—
my ovaries sore & bloated
for days. Five mature,

four fertilized, two
healthy enough
to keep. One

inside me & one
in a freezer
in Waltham.

 

Rage Hezekiah is a New England–based poet and educator who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She is a Cave Canem, Ragdale, and MacDowell fellow and a recipient of the Saint Botolph Emerging Artist Award and a Vermont Arts Council Artist Development Grant. Her new collection, Yearn, is a 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest winner. She is the author of Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press, 2019) and Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Rage’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” The Cincinnati Review, The Colorado Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She also serves as interviews editor at The Common. You can find more of her work a ragehezekiah.com.

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