My Mother and Food

She loved the burned parts, crusts, the sauce
gone to sludge at the bottom of the pan, bacon
curled in on itself, still crackling as she brought it
to her mouth, blew away the smoke, “Nice” she’d say,
the egg white rimmed in black lace, or forking up
the wrinkled butt of the roast, chewing the tough meat
to a mush between her false teeth. She served herself
what we didn’t want, never threw anything out, scraped
the edge of the pan with a spoon where the white cake
had baked to the color and texture of dry dirt. As for us,
she’d hand out the baby oil before we left in our bikini’s
to lay our bodies like loaves of bread in the retort of the sun.
When we returned, hours later, burnt to a crisp, she’d
retrieve the Jergen’s Lotion she kept in the fridge, smear
our shoulders and backs, the angry red creases behind
our knees, then sat down and waited for us to turn brown.

Author of the article

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, is currently available from W.W. Norton. Her fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. In 2001, she was invited by late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress.