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| Image source: John Darkow/Columbia [MO] Daily Tribune |
You like your muffin pan with butter.
You eat it whole so the cups don’t stick
in your throat. The butter helps.
You like your waiters black in white face.
You like stock still dark black men with trays for a party.
You drink iced tea with mint. You smile
and belch a champagne-coated muffin tin burp.
You’re like a cookbook with hand drawings
of the Skyline drive, Smithfield ham on buttered
biscuits. The muffin tin constipates you
a little bit. China will manage spiral-cut hams
with your face on their packages. China
makes your muffin tins bigger every year.
You eat muffin tins for lunch. You eat
muffin tins, buttered, for breakfast.
You keep the cast iron bacon press greased
with bacon fat. Nothing sticks in your craw.
The cast iron bacon press tastes like Tennessee
in 1963. Your little monkey cooks it best.
Everything’s so hard to pass these days,
goes down easy, but sticks and stinks, a black
hard stool in your soft pink bowels.
Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky.