Cooking Lesson

Shira Haus
 

Crete, Greece

The man directs                    the woman
as she raises the ax                brings it down
to sever the goat’s leg             from its torso.
Bravo. Very good.                  Bravo. The rest of us cluster
ant-like. The goat’s                 bone is thick
enough that she must             keep going,
splinter each tendon               one by one.
Later, we slit the skin             with paring knives,
stuff it with oregano              garlic as fat as earlobes.
His wife shows us how           to knead wads of sourdough
to spoon rice and broth           into zucchini we’ve scraped hollow.
Later, the man kisses              one of us, too young
eyes big as the moon              brown as wet soil.
The sweet stink                      of a hand-rolled cigar
held to her lips. The great        boom of his voice,
gentle. Taming an animal       that was never wild.
The news gets around,            we chew its gristle.
We don’t mean to                  stare at her over dinner,
fork oven-roasted meat           herbed butter beans and feta
into our mouths, but we do     push fried potatoes
around a pool of olive oil        drink glass after glass of bitter
red wine. It feels so good:         hunger, then eat. To satisfy
what will not be silenced.       To silence what will not
be satisfied.

Shira Haus (she/her) is a queer, Jewish writer pursuing an MFA at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Identity Theory, HAD, and Honey Literary, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry. She works as an Associate Poetry Editor for Grist Journal, a reader for The Maine Review, and the Reading Series Coordinator for Sundress Publications. You can find her on Instagram at @shirahaus and on Twitter @shira_leah.

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