POEM
How to Cook a Wolf
If your mother's like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe
you'll get cooked by getting evicted
since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing.
And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open:
the fathers can creep up on anything when it's still too wet
to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed
or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling
and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch
and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on
until they're cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you
and cooking and cooking the gist
of you needing your crannies hot with a good man's body-silt
until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers
and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver
and Ajax too and Minwax Oh
in this the dumbstruck story of the American female
as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress
while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.
Source: Poetry (October 2008).
This poem originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Poetry.
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