The Hungry Ear by Kevin Young Page B

and sometimes Daddy and I
would dance to those angry pop sounds,
he’d let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen
and my mother huffed and puffed
on the other side of the door.
When you are famous
,
Daddy asks me,
will you write about dancing
in the kitchen with your father?

I say everything I write will be about you,
then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl
and spin, but then he stops.
And sniffs the air.
    The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it’s crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,
    poems are born.

The Onion
    MARGARET GIBSON
    Mornings when sky is white as dried gristle
and the air’s unhealthy, coast
smothered, and you gone
    I could stay in bed
    and be the woman who aches for no reason, each day
a small death of love, cold rage for dinner,
coffee and continental indifference
at dawn.
    Or dream lazily a market day—
    bins of fruit and celery, poultry strung up,
loops of garlic and peppers. I’d select one
yellow onion, fist-sized, test its sleek
hardness, haggle, and settle a fair price.
    Yesterday, a long day measured by shovel
and mattock, a wrestle with roots—
calm and dizzy when I bent over to loosen my shoes
at the finish—I thought
    if there were splendors,
    what few there were, knowledge of them
in me like fire in flint
I would have them …
    and now I’d say the onion,
    I’d have that, too. The work it took,
the soup it flavors, the griefs
innocently it summons.

Tomatoes
    STEPHEN DOBYNS
    A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at her breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their heads to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

Ode to Gumbo
    KEVIN YOUNG
    For weeks I have waited
for a day without death
or doubt. Instead
the sky set afire
    or the flood
filling my face.
A stubborn drain
nothing can fix.
    Every day death.
Every morning death
& every night
& evening
    And each hour
a kind of winter—
all weather
is unkind. Too
    hot, or cold
that creeps the bones.
Father, your face
a faith
    I can no longer see.
Across the street
a dying, yet
still-standing tree.

    So why not
make a