Slow Food

Wrote both these poems tonight within five minutes of each other. Weird, because I kind of like both of them. How often does that happen? My inner fences must be down due to lack of sleep and constant academic angst. And those low fences must translate to decent poetry.

Becky Adams
Grandparents

They die, we pack up their correspondence
and give away their alarm clocks. We store their
file cabinets in the garage and paste their photos
into our albums. Or we store their albums.
We never speak about them or we discuss
them constantly, willfully, with anger.
As if we all have to have loved them more.
As if they rode away on a white ass
to Jerusalem and martyrdom, instead of
wilting like white cabbage in hospital beds
with their names and numbers
tattooed in blue bands on their wrists.

Slow Food

Takes her forever to get to the table,
swinging hips into friends, slinging arms
across shoulders of young men,
pressing old professors into scented
hugs. By the time she slips in beside me
her eyes are shining. Everything
like old times.

We order and spin shining cutlery
under mood lighting and laugh
about whatever comes to mind,
our jobs, this party, our president’s
follies. Tonight she is so beautiful,
cushioned by the breath
of all who love her.

Month from now she’ll be ash
in the Adriatic, but I can’t worry
that bone under the table tonight.
I’ll lose now, lose this linen feeling,
lose this woman snorting water
when I tell the joke that ends
in inner prayer: Oh God, thank you
for slow food.