Poetry Friday – The Word is KITCHEN

I can’t seem to get focus this morning. I woke up every couple hours last night, looked at the clock, and resumed some crazy dream of Japan and video games and being naked.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

The Poetry Friday Word for today is KITCHEN. Please feel free to use it in your blog post today, in whatever colorful ball of yarn you choose to knit with…poem, photo, audio post of you cooking breakfast, tapestry hanging, Aunt Edna’s recipe for green jello with carrots.

Me? I can only do fragments. In addition to sleep dep, I’m cutting down on coffee, which is making the synapses mis-fire in sparkly little patterns this a.m.

Have a good weekend, y’all!


KITCHEN

1) One of my fondest childhood memories is of riding my tricycle in the kitchen, in the space where the table used to be and where another table was yet to be built. I was 4 year old. Maybe 5. My mom was making grilled cheese and bean soup. There was music, and winter snow piled up outside, and it was the most secure I ever felt, or will ever feel.

2) My mom started teaching me how to cook when I was 9. The first thing she taught me was how to use a paring knife. I was amazed at how she did it…she’d hold a piece of fruit or a potato in her left hand, and peel it with her right, and every stroke sent the knife into the meaty part of her thumb. But it never cut her. She carefully explained it was because she’d had lots of practice, and she never hurt herself. I think of her every time I peel a potato, and how my thumbs are now like hers.

3) The house we live in now has an itty-bitty kitchen. I can touch all the countertop surfaces at once. If I ever won the lottery, I’d attack the kitchen fiercely and make it bigger than the garage.

4) My first job out of college was in a restaurant, in the kitchen. I had a torrid little affair with the cutest guy there, and we’d sometimes lock ourselves in the little bathroom off the back.

5) Now-defunct band Groove Spoon cut a cd in the early 90s that was very sexy, and very funky, and it’s remained one of my favorite cds of all time. I tried to search for lyrics and just got lost. Ah well. This is all I remember, to go with ‘kitchen’:

Black Pepper

Let me into your kitchen baby
I got some cookin’ to do
Wit you
We gonna cook up some of that love potion
Gonna put it into that stew

If you’re cookin’ up a recipe
To put life in your bread
Better keep these finer points in mind
Like my momma said

Brown sugar
Black pepper
Don’t go together

We’re gonna
Bang bang bang
Bang them pots
Momma I got just the utensil for you

If you’re cookin’ up a recipe
To put life in your bed
Better keep these finer points in mind
Like my momma said