Cooking Among Our Cupboards
By Dana Tenille Weekes
i prefer empty paper towel rolls to film daddy when we cook hot dogs for dinner. daddy takes the marigold apron blushed with bleach in two spots. it’s the one i always give him & he gives Julia Child a beard & Bajan accent his tenor breaking both our funny bones: & once dey have boiled you must take dem & slice each into triangles like dis. you see? you see is daddy’s cue for me to hold tight onto that paper towel roll, tilt my braided ponytail & zoom in to the rubbed-away cutting board as rice gripes in a pot’s humidity & onions perspire to the finish on a back burner. daddy tells me, we never need much salt. he says often, we never need much. reminds me, you can cook good without salt (and butter). the things he says would rile the real Julia. bottle clanking bottle in the cupboard. its oak -knotted belly binged with curry & cumin & grounded sorts whose names i am still learning. the sort of things ships once risked their hulls for in vexed seas & occupied ambitions, i would soon learn. each bottle past my tippytoed arms on otherwise unoccupied shelves i never notice as daddy tells me, zoom in come closer & closer & closer
Dana Tenille Weekes lives in the swirl of Washington, DC, where she navigates the worlds of law, policy, and politics. Some of her poems can be found, or are forthcoming, in A Gathering of the Tribes, Apogee, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Elevation Review, and Torch Literary Arts. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in Rhino Poetry’s 2022 Founders’ Prize.
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Th umami of this poem, craft and content both, are a treat! I want to read more.