This week, we’re featuring poems about food and all the many ways it sustains us. Because food is community and memory. It’s struggle, joy, and so much more.
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Lesson: Chicken Soup
by Christine Kitano
``` My grandmother pours salt into my right palm, places thin slivers of garlic in my left. She explains
something about blood, how to salt the raw bird to drain its fluids, but my mind already wanders:
I watch the chicken shrivel but compose instead the grandfather I’ve only met in story: daybreak, he’s just finished
mopping up in the buildings that sculpt this city’s skyline, but it’s someone else’s view of Los Angeles.
The immigrant sees, not the postcard-perfect lights, but the scuffed tiles, dust-lined desks, the darkening throats of toilet after toilet.
Home, he tiptoes upstairs not to wake his daughters, holding his shoes like a thief. He’s fired
for stealing a roll of toilet paper, a can of soda for my mother. Children are nothing but trouble, my grandmother says,
shaking a wooden spoon. My mother claims the story otherwise: it was she who accompanied father to work, she
who stole a box of stale donuts, she who lost the family’s first job. Grandmother shrugs and repeats the same
conclusion. Never have children, she says, though her expression is hidden by the steam now rising from the pot.
It’s a simple recipe: boil until the meat falls from the bones, easy, like a girl shedding a summer dress.
Last night, I cooked for friends. After dinner, my friend handed me his one-month son, who only
blinked when I nudged my thumb into his fist. Earlier, washing the pale bird, I struggled to keep the body
from slipping through my hands: I held its small-fleshed form under cold water, pulled the giblets out the round hollow
between its ribs and was surprised to be surprised when it didn’t make a sound. ```
"Lesson: Chicken Soup" by Christine Kitano, from SKY COUNTRY by Christine Kitano, copyright © 2017 Christine Kitano. Used by permission of BOA Editions.