You know, this woman
Never fails
To astound me

She is mixing the ladies’ fingers
Chopped and fried
With sautéed, spiced onions
And I watch
As she dips the pan
Toward herself
And all the oil runs over
Like a lost child
At the sight of his sister
In a crowd

With the other hand
She pushes those vegetables
Into the awaiting ***
Places the pan aside
And grabs hold of the ***
Twisting her wrists
Working up the magic

She flips the greens
Over the crescent onions
Mingling them up
And in front of my eyes
She has cooked up a dish

Then she spins the wheat dough
In between her fingers
Nimble as a dove’s beak
Tossing it from palm to palm and
All of a sudden
It is a flattened sun

She turns it around on the griddle
Before exposing it to the flames
It rises, rises, then falls
A breathing thing
And
Goodness be ******
She doesn’t even burn it
Not a single mark
She cooked the sun over blue fires
Turned it into a moon

I wonder how she does it
My mother
Master an art she doesn’t even like
While I—
I fiddle around
With my pens and brushes
The smug blankness

Of neglected canvases
And unfilled pages
Mocking me of a fairy-light child
I could not become—

Every time I
talk to my demons,
it always comes back
to you.