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Nat Lipstadt Jul 2021
Of ***** roasting pans and racks and island fog!

if you love me, then you know poems wright themselves when standing, driving, bus riding, love-making and especially when
doing manly battle, ******* ***** dishwashing midst island fog

a passing remark goes noticed and summoned to a
Friday night feast, roasted fowl, wild rice with golden raisins and mushrooms, English spring peas, was it a Montrachet?

for dessert the washing up is obligation mine, a traditional desertion,
separation of church and state, her cooking a church  in which I worship, she states eloquently:
“Unto Caesaria , Render Her the cleanup”

this is hand to hand combat, no dishwasher mechanical
can scrub like the human hand, and with body english,
water hot, but no gloves employed for this is ***** man’s work,
not for sissies, cleaning roasting pans and roasting racks
that are at least twenty years burnt and crusted with a blackened
finish, residue of other lovers and dinners P.N. (pre-nat)

array three kinds of sponges and some human & metallic *****,
no one asking which came first,
the scrubbing away of life feasting residues,
or the poem writing that comes with pre & postscript sleepiness

when I say the dark stains and the grease buildup are
flavor enhancers, am beknighted with starry stares of
“how stupid do you think I am?” and sadly return to the
Battle of Agincourt, the one the American lost….



but they do source poems that flavor life

2020
*sometime last year?
Pots, pans and plates
Pots, pans

And the larder
A ghost house
Trembling

The larder
Stocked with oats and rice
Pots

And when it is time to cook
And then the gas stove is lit for
A feast

Pots, pans and plates
- Rows of jars line
The windowsill

Preserves, chutneys, jams
Preserves, chutneys
- and mango atchar

That reminds me
Of India
Oh! Lord Gandhi!

— The End —