Nourishment

 

                       

In my old fuzzy flowered nightgown, I scramble eggs.

The fusia arms of the sun wave goodbye:

Night knocks its hollow black on the door and winks at us with twinkle eyes.

If she were here, we would eat spaghetti.

 

 

I cook the eggs as my brother and sister watch my back,

Only my tousled hair and bare feet they see,

Abandoning the comedy sitcom on the rabbit-eared t.v. to wait.

Rehearsed laughter vibrates the speakers, quietly calling them back.

 

Their eager mouths holding tasting tongues for bellowing bellies,

Calling louder as the skillet smell of the stove and the

Toasting bread waiting to be dressed in butter permeates the room.

It dances the jig in their noses, rousing their eagerness even more.

 

Earlier, after we had escaped the musty confines of the bus

And relished in the glory of our weekend freedom,

I hunted through the cabinets and the old brown fridge

Planning what I would feed them with.

 

I would have produced cereal from a Technicolor cardboard box as

My little sister’s hands are good only for gripping crayons and would have

Spilt the milk, but that milk had all long been digested so

I moved my compass eyes south to the plastic nest of the fridge door.

 

Tomorrow, hunt and gather day. Our mom had already

Stalked the week’s sales papers, now a table cloth of treasure maps.

She made her list with her neatly nickered handwriting. It

Rested, safely enclosed in a hidden chamber of her purse, a promise of bounty.

 

We would spend the day with windows down

So the baby-eyed sky could watch our journey.

Her cigarette ashes would dance in the wind and our faces grew red,

Crossing our arms with the hostility of lost shot gun wars.

 

Traveling from store to store, the air conditioning coolness

Ripped from our foreheads and necks the sweaty seams of our wind-brushed hair

Until at last we captured the meat and milk that would have soured in our treasure trunk

With the rest of our bagged-up hoard strewn over an old tire.

 

But that would be tomorrow and tonight blanketed us so

I am cooking them eggs. The sizzling sounds of the frying pan

Harmonizes with the scrape-scrape percussion of my spatula-hand,

Filling their little gobbling ears with a dinner song,

Beckoning them to the table to eat scrambled eggs because

She is not here with spaghetti and there is no milk.