27 March 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 1

Remembering Food

by CHRISTINA MISITE

I have no recipes

that remind me of home,

only the memory of my mother

cooking, cutting up fruit: hunks of watermelon,

quartered strawberries. I can stay in and bake

apple pies but I cannot recover

her movement through the kitchen

or popsicles at age seven: the sticky fingers,

sun-warmed shoulders, July stretching lazily before me.

I have inherited simple things:

no fancy silverware, none

of my great-grandmother's china,

only a slotted plastic spoon, perfect

for black beans; some yellow bowls;

the need for a clean, wide sweep

of counter on which to chop garlic,

slice tiny limes, my fingers stinging

and fragrant.