Accounting for taste

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt: With “Pittsylvania County” by Ellen Bryant Voigt in mind, write a poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

My first real job was working catered events at a local country club. I almost wrote about the interview for that job rather than the work itself, because at 15 it was also my first time stepping foot into that place, of which many of my friends’ families were members. But nothing comes back to me in more visceral memories than the food itself — the searing heat, the dizzying mixture of sweet and savory smells, the speed of reinvention … running into the kitchen to faint, never in front of guests. I still pass out in busy, hot places; it still feels like a rebirth, sometimes.

I would like to expand on the ideas in this one, but it does the job for now.

Wedding soup

At my first wedding, scooping
ice cream, smiling at guests from
behind frosted buckets, cold floating
up in spirals. Everyone wants all three
flavors. At my second wedding, pouring
shrimp over grits in cocktail glasses with
a narrow rim, fingers bathing all night in the
sauce’s heat. Everyone wants more of every
-thing. At my third wedding, carving a slab of
medium-rare meat, feeling pores clinch under
the heat lamp. I drop the knife before I hit the
floor. The sous bringing me two glasses of viscid
mango juice then sending me home. At my fourth
and final wedding, filling a saucepan with rice so
I can practice flipping omelettes with no spatula.
The grains take flight, spreading a celebration
to every corner of the country club kitchen.