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.