essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?
My mom, that’s who.
My memories can be quantified in cups of tea,
and meat pies filled perfectly, slumped against
a mountain of mash
…across the bitter world, a sweet gift from Pachamama
like my father who taught me to feel
and press its skin: a map of lost worlds
Fried dough dishes are a universal constant.
gluey congee cooked with
yellow ginger
salted pork
thousand-year-old eggs
constantly stirred to make sure
it doesn’t stick to the bottom
Mom’s in charge and tells us to watch how it’s done,
tucking and folding
until she holds above our heads, like a baptized child,
our exemplar tamale
“Just like that!” ¡Perfecto!
We pass plates of kawage, kibbeh, moutabal
between us around the semi-circle of table.
When monsoon Gods claim mid-day skies,
mortals yearn for the aromas of the celestial kitchen.
come inside! we’ve got so much to show you! over there you’ll find a mosaic-laden platter of figs, dates, & grapes, little green & purple appetizers like bougainvillea petals against a vine-entangled fence.
Through this shared language, seen in the celebration of Shabbat at our round dinner table, we create a “home”, a space of belonging, for a culture that has frequently been forcefully ripped from its physical roots.
I am 12 years old, looking over the precast-cement fence of my neighbour’s house in Chatsworth, South Africa.
For a while I would obsess over how I could make my London plot look less like itself and more like the one I’d walked through as a child on summer holidays.
Porridge 