Hot Buttered Grits by Allyson Horton
These poems had to be boiled in water.
Opposite of Minute Rice heat & serve quick cups.
Simmered next to Alabama greens.
Big Mama’s fatback & brown beans.
Aunt Effie’s homemade buttermilk biscuits.
Miss Louise’s cornmeal dredged freshwater catfish.
This is how we do it.
Women who do not play in the kitchen or mince
emotions as if they were garlic.
A pinch of salt.
Idiom slow-cooked.
Aroma thick with the scent of finely chopped shallots sautéed in real butter.
So these recipes stay on his breath even when
he leaves one roof to go break bread under another.
Love’ll make you do right, love’ll make you do wrong,
Make you come home early, make you stay out all night long
And with the drop of a needle on a suddenly turned table,
the range-top porridge thickens.
Some women have no trouble swallowing back kisses that taste
less & less like where he says he’s been
when he comes home three o’ clock in the morning
hungry for the one thing he can’t get no place else.
Home cooking is like poetry—an art and an omen.
While the coffee’s black steam from a fresh pot
would’ve served him right,
Mary chose to make her point by reaching for the nearest weapon
she could find leaving a smoldering record
of a woman’s love & unhappiness scalded into his memory.
Love’ll make you do right, love’ll make you do wrong,
Make you come home early, make you stay out all night long
Words like ‘I love you’ are so final.
Entering the flesh like a bullet.
Each syllable clinging to the candle waxed sweat on
the small of one’s back.
Trajectory unstoppable.
Connotation impalpable.
I am a believer in all things holy as sin
like the gospel of tambourine & horn colliding,
the midnight siren of falsetto screaming
the Lord’s name in vain.
Takes the soul of Al Green to remind some folk—
Black poems have to be boiled in water.
Hot-buttered grits that they are
© 2018 by Allyson Horton from Quick Fire, Third World Press Foundation. Reprinted with permission of author.
