Poetry by Kate Stoltzfus
What Keeps You Up at Night
My parents learned sleep was dangerous
on an afternoon with all the gardens growing tall.
Early summer in Brooklyn, while everyone watered
their flowers, we took a nap in the same room, his
blooming heart closing like a bud. For years, they
would not let me fall into bed alone, the way the nurses
first listened through the night for beat and breath,
snow flapping at the windows, dark plums beating
in our thin chests. Bonne nuit, my mother used to say
as she kissed us goodnight, even though she was not French.
Check on me, I used to say when she left, a plea lifted
from a history I didn’t remember. How do you close your eyes
with no one watching? I had learned love looks
like a dark room, someone’s shape in a chair, someone
on the other side of the bed, someone listening
for the hush of a body keeping time,
someone opening the door
a crack, to let in the light.
Recipe for Staying
You take a raw chicken in your hands like a baby,
massage oil into its skin before we crack the ribs
down the middle. You tell me to listen for the split.
You do not look like destruction yet. The snow
pokes holes in the clouds while we make food
from a hot country, the first place you lived
away from home. It’s a myth to say the spices
come last — strongest stuff first, a turmeric to color
the onions until they go soft. We use fabric against
the oven’s inferno, hand each other knives sharp side
down, blow the spoon cool before testing rice
simmered in coconut milk.
So many meals left. So much to eat.
So many other ways other than air
to feed your hungry body. Who else will
teach me what to hold in my mouth?
Kate Stoltzfus is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in The Journal, Atticus Review, Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and elsewhere. Connect with her via email at kate.stoltz@hotmail.com or @kate.stoltz on Instagram.
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