I am the daughter of my mother’s strange desires.
the spicy, the pungent, the salty, the aromatic,
these were her lovers and her legacy to me.
We would come home month after month to the same
spaghetti casserole—she kept baking it
for thirty years, each ingredient the same,
salami sliced to an exact thickness,
heated to the same precise Fahrenheit temperature and left,
uncovered, for exactly the same number of minutes
every time it was prepared
So that if you were to slip into that lengthy, deep,
yet fitful sleep of childhood, passing,
you’d swear it was the only one she ever cooked,
sleeping and waiting, waiting and eating,
the casserole slowly disappearing, taken in bites
between dreams.
Food was my mother’s path to Nirvana.
like a mantra she kept repeating
for thirty years, the same long sound.
The citrus and the spicy, the sour and the salty
each to satisfy her in their own way and time.
When I grew up and fled the nest,
my mother found her solace in restaurants.
Dining in the Schezuan half light
finding comfort in the Kung Pao chicken
peace in the shrimp lo mein.
Noodles damp with anticipation
My mother’s stomach fat with the memory of
hundreds of identical meals long since eaten,
long since forgotten.
I inherited her taste for citrus, salt and heat.
The tongue responsive, bathed in the clear, light fluid
of remorseless, sexless salivation.
I sometimes drink a glass of pure, iridescent lime juice,
The burn of it going down
puckering the esophagus like a fine blend of whiskey,
satisfying warmth filling the gullet.
Like her, I crave the salty play of anchovies
swimming through mozzarella ponds on deep pan pizza, or
leaping and diving among the romaine, the endive,
the radishes, cohabiting with capers,
arching across hearts of palm
and later, that unquenchable thirst
The abdominal umbilicus that ties me to my mother—
her appetites, her ways of appeasing them.
Beth A. Firestein