If You Can’t Sing in the Choir, At Least You Can Help Prep Lunch

If You Can’t Sing in the Choir, At Least You

Can Help Prep Lunch

Laura Trimble

Food is the language I speak best, anyway.
We might not know how to say much more
in each other’s language beyond hello
but we both agree that peeling potatoes
is a waste of time, they’re meant to be
a little feo. It’s enough to be merely
one in a host of peelers of oranges.
There is afternoon enough to relax
into the rhythm of all these tomatoes.
I might even learn a trick for coring them.
If at first you can’t stripe cucumbers
no te preocupes; there’s forty more.
We both agree that the melons here
are nothing like they were back home, but
contrary to how it may seem, all that
killing salt is what it takes
for the bread to knit itself together.
I wonder how many abuelitas
in both our histories would have preferred
this wooden spoon to my favorite spatula
I cannot find, and whether there’s a magic
angle it gave them to work the lumps out.
Though I suspect I’m not the only
one who thinks the lumps taste best.
I may have been in tears yesterday
wanting to give up on myself, and you,
and this whole enterprise, yet today
there’s nothing anywhere I treasure more
than being the one to put Bread in your hands.

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Laura Trimble
Writer & Teacher

Laura’s poetry and prose have appeared in Plough, the Rabbit Room, Calla Press, Storyboard, Literary Revelations, and Humane Pursuits. You can find more of her work on Instagram at @trimblepoetry.

 Photography by Marta Dzedyshko