The creak of hinges <br />upon opening my mother's recipe box <br />its stale contents amok, oil and batter stained <br />Familiar. <br />And the wondrous half hope that <br /> like a jinn from a lamp, <br />it would yield a ghost of old. <br />But therein dwell only musty torn-from-newspaper recipes, <br />(when they made fonts small and delicate as lace hoops) <br />and each ingredient a gram and a litre, pinches <br />and hearty scoops. <br />Mine is the wobbly, earnest scrawl. <br />Verbose and impossible, my mulberry buns <br /> were the pride of my kitchen. Yield 3 dozen. <br />And then her small, unimposing cursive, <br />legible barely in each swoop and dive, <br />you wish you knew what it meant. <br />That last tiny blue word, and you <br /> press two dry lips to that paper, <br />like the smell of saplings and dusty Estee Lauder, <br />she was there, <br />and her pen scraped there once. <br />Sacred. <br />Watermelon pickles and Québécois preserves, <br />she warns the rhubarb leaves are poisonous. <br />You think you've seen a window, <br />but it's only a box, and time has changed nothing <br />for a vast <br />unending <br />moment.<br /><br />Katrina Harms<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/recipes-3/
