Five poems by Lilah Heganauer

Mortar & Pestle
 
Those tufted ears,
   latticed by a chain
of speckle and filament:
 
barn door, owl, kitchen
   window, ourselves. We pocked
time into a thousand
 
episodic dinners: cardamom
   and bee balm, vanilla—
here's to marking them
 
against a future blight,
   alba withering in the
side yard, barn gone stale,
 
and me: childminder, cake,
   nightjar, potato, potato,
suckle and spit, egg and tomato.
 
 
 
 
Ladle
 
What came before
this fondant, boreal,
 
these housed, orectic
filaments—valid, sweaty,
 
needlessly flannel—
mouthed and punctual,
 
and affixedbut him:
swift little orecchiette
 
on the cutting board,
tenderizing the abalone,
 
parentheses, pistillate:
spoon, fever, & shell.  
 
 
 
 
Spoon Rest

With thee, in the Desert—
With thee in the thirst—
 
(Dickinson)

Milkfish in the laundered night,
   swept bare, these boards, listel
and lather, rugs upended in the slim
   antechamber—barrow of pine
split small, your parka and boots
   still dripping on the bricks.
And you, inside: once, I felt
   a joy that was as old as a two
knees knocking, as a woodstove
   ticking hot, as its stovepipe
about to ignite. Once I entered
   a room on fire to read. If it is time,
anchor your heart and pack it
   in your impossible cavity, lung,
lung, ribs, and veins. And keep the
   kettle hot for me, and limber up.
 
 
 
 
Rolling Pin
 
Novel heirlooms—lister, joist—
I could be wrong and glad.
 
Appallingly awkward, maybe I grasp
at everything. Our gathering, our coming
 
and going, burrowing our chestnuts
and nesting our scraps of twine:
 
maybe we will continue. Snow might
go on, despair might bring ease,
 
and I will believe something beyond
this body, this room, these cells you claim.
 
But if I'm right, and this failing,
heating, damned world and self
 
is our terminus, maybe I can know—
at least—infinity here, a piecrust so
 
flaky you could cry, an apple so small
and purple you could scalp it and dry it
 
for a mezuzah. The span of us only
this wide, on the verge of wrong.  
 
 
 
 
Whisk
 
Long might this sky be familiar, embodied, fossae
and palm, and cinched the apron as a spigot
 
to heat me, rinsing and drying the berries
I handle and mash. Long the bulb
 
of these wires itself was a handbook: stiff,
peaked, wet and dry. Unready, too, tightly
 
pleated, coveting the hidden fold; the kit
of mink, the stolid wheat, the air of wholly
 
unremarkable noons and their sandwiches,
clumsy, homely, arctic, mine. I am a
 
maiden oven; watch me torch meringues.
Long this calibration might nimble me yours.