The Best American Poetry

Two Platitudes (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easier said than done is almost always true:

For example, the act of getting out of bed.

On some days I find laborious to do,

But I got lots bigger worries in my head.
Like, making a tuna melt is effortless to say

But is there tuna in the house? What kind?

No Chicken of the Sea? If not, I may

Goddamn well simply change my mind.

Yet the smart boy wrote how dying

Is easier done than to talk about:

It happens by itself. Just take a breath,

Your last one, and the lights go out.

   Sometimes longed for, but sometimes cruel,

   Is the good old exception, that proves the rule.'

 

 

Shakespeare's sonnet #67 on the Bard's birthday

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrout is,
Beggared of blood to blush through lively veins,
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains?
   O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
   In days long since, before these last so bad.

"Hysteria" [by T. S. Eliot, 1885-1965]

 

 

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..." I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

 

 

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven [by William Butler Yeats]

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Amy Dougher-Solórzano: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich

 

Anything can be an altar.

I skip Easter mass

to sit by the window

in my old bedroom.

(The walls are still pink

but the hospital bed

is new.)

April sun pools

on my father’s chest

& the tray of offerings

beside him:

a mug of coffee,

now cold;

quartered strawberries,

their red juices

seeping lazily

across the plate

toward the English muffin

with Taylor ham

& congealed eggs.

My father snores

& to me it is birdsong.

It reminds me

of an old photo

on my mother’s fridge:

him asleep in a beach chair

in Wildwood Crest:

mouth open,

one earbud dangling loose

like a new species of jellyfish.

Now he sleeps curled

in the nautilus shell

of his own spine,

coral pink bath towel

rolled & tucked

under his bad knee.

I like to imagine

he is being cradled

in the hand of a giant

I can’t see—

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Dougher-Solórzano is a poet originally from Harrison, New Jersey. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and a BS in chemical biology from Saint Joseph’s University. She was selected by the Fine Arts Work Center as a 24PearlStreet Scholar for Fall 2024. Her poems have appeared in New England Review and Rattle. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband Aleck. [“Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich” first appeared in New England Review, Volume 46.1 in March 2025.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                    A Sick Man in Bed, a Woman Praying to the Virgin and Child. Oil painting by Du Moulin, 1750.

"April 19" [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1996, I wrote:

 

We have too much exhibitionism
and not enough voyeurism
in poetry we have plenty of bass
and not enough treble, more amber
beer than the frat boys can drink but
less red wine than meets the lip
in this beaker of the best Bordeaux,
too much thesis, too little antithesis
and way too much New York Times
in poetry we've had too much isolationism
and too few foreign entanglements
we need more Baudelaire on the quai
d'Anjou more olive trees and umbrella pines
fewer leafless branches on the rue Auguste Comte
too much sociology not enough Garcia Lorca
more colons and dashes fewer commas
less love based on narrow self-interest
more lust based on a feast of kisses
too many novels too few poems
too many poets not enough poetry

 

-- April 19, 1996

“The Overture”: New "Next Line, Please" Prompts [by David Lehman]

 

On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s Next Line, Please entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.

But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.

****

For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks

Here are some titles that strike me as promising:

• “The Lottery”
• Persuasion
• “The Necklace”
• The Wings of the Dove
• Under the Volcano
• Light in August
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• The Beautiful and Damned

But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.

Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.

from The American Scholar

Detail of Orpheus and Eurydice by Sir Edward Poynter, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

Unrest by Emily Fragos [by Nin Andrews]

Every now and then, I come across a quiet little poem that sticks in my head, like "Unrest" by Emily Fragos. Maybe because I worked at the local SPCA when I was a girl, or maybe because I lived on a farm where we received drive-by cats every spring,  this poem speaks to me. It settles in the heart, just so. 

 Unrest
By Emily Fragos

At the shelter, the cats are kept in glass-enclosed cases with just enough room to stand, walk a few steps, and eat; but strangers come on weekends to adopt them, take them to larger rooms and give them new names: James, Tabitha, Snowball, Molière, so you would never know how they began their lives, in abuse, grave hunger, and deprivation, or what strange turbulence lies coiled up inside their bodies, as they float to the top of  warm stone walls or sleep in a lone patch of sun on the newlyweds’ bed.

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

______

Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.

Two Tragedies in Life [by Walter Carey]

What do it mean?

Trans studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer, and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies of flesh and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice, and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: What is the "corporeal real"? If anyone can build a nuclear bomb, should we report him or deport her? Why is "cunt" less acceptable than "pussy"? How does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? How might one approach nonhuman interiority? On the basis of what principle would you refute the Freud in "The Future of an Illusion"? How do you define "woman"? Have you ever heard a meadowlark?

-- Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

-- Shaw, Man and Superman: "There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."

-- Did Voltaire have a mixed view of Plato? If Voltaire, despite ranting against the church, believedf in God, what attributes does that divinity have?.

Comment on four of the following:

-- “We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”

-- Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"

“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.” -- Alexander Pope, "Moral Essays"

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street."

--Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

 “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.” -- Henry Miller

“I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” -- Ruskin

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” -- Disraeli

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" - Joseph Stalin

And Dostoyevski on Lenin, Rousseau, Marx etc.:
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”

Marsh Hawk Press: Poetry Contest (judged by Elaine Equi]

2025 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes The Contest Will Close Soon. DEADLINE: 11:59 pm Wednesday, April 30th Contest Judge: ELAINE EQUI  Submit Manuscript Here

2025 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes

The Contest Will Close Soon.

DEADLINE: 11:59 pm

Wednesday, April 30th

Contest Judge: ELAINE EQUI 

Submit Manuscript Here

On Jackie Robinson Day

“It kills me to lose. If I’m a troublemaker, and I don’t think that my temper makes me one, then it’s because I can’t stand losing. That’s the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first

—“To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen in sports.” -- Pee Wee Reese

 

Sestina for Susan Sontag [poem by Tim Disch (1940-2008)]

Sestina for Susan Sontag
    --by Tom Disch

Susan, you must allow me to condescend
This once. I suppose you mean well, but
Is Godot what they really need off there
in Sarajevo? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile,
And amusing, to offer some gallows comedy
About the awful life they've all been living?

Of course, everyone needs to earn a living, 
And Beckett may be a better bet than "Muse, descend,
And help me write, right now, the comedy
All Yugoslavia's been waiting for." Better the butt
Of a few ephemeral lampoons while
The neverending crisis lasts than for there

To be new proofs that the Muse is rarely there
When she is summoned. Bad faith? Who's not living,
After all, one kind of lie or another? And while
There are hopefuls and a stage to send
Clowns on, there's life at the box office. But
Can't we, in hindsight, posit an original comedy?

One germane to the situation: a comedy
of terrorism that would show unshaven Serbs their
Visages, complacently corrupt as Joey Butt-
Afuoco, smirking and working for a living 
In prime time; show Croats gloating at the end
Of what little civilization they had; as, meanwhile,

Muslims pray for a new jihad. What would Simone Weil
Have woven from such contradictories, what comedy
of a Godot-less and godless world without end,
Rhymeless and unreasoning? Susan, Susan, there
Would be more comfort in Sarajevo from the Living
Theater's Frankenstein than from the droning sackbut

Of Samuel Beckett. Leave them alone. But, 
If you must meddle, offer an evening of Kurt Weill.
Have Bob Hope tell them life's worth living.
Appease them with sentimental comedy
By anyone but Beckett, and let is moral be: There, 
With the grace of God, go we. But don't condescent. 

Pretend you're human. And smile. Send but
A sentence to where they're waiting: Life's worthwhile,
And all's forgiven in the comedy we are still living.

       --- by Tom Disch (Poetry magazine, March 1996)

(Ed note: In 1993, Susan Sontag went to Sarajevo to stage a production of Waiting for Godot. Thomas Michael Disch was a celebrated American science fiction writer, critic, and poet. You can read more about him here. sdl)

Age & Arizona 2025 [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Glad to be back in the desert
After all the wasted years;
The javelinas of the 1950s
Are gone now of course 
But new ones have arrived 
and they still need water only
A few times during the year;
The big saguaro cacti can be 
Two hundred years old and 
When a beautiful young king snake
Went looking for a place to hide 
I knew exactly how it felt although 
I'm not quite eighty yet. Look!
There's a female tarantula.

Echad Mi Yodea (Choreography by Ohad Naharin, Batsheva Dance Company) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Jews all over the world are observing Passover this week. On the first night (and for some on the second and final nights as well) we gather around for the Seder, a ritual meal during which we retell the story from the Book of Exodus when the Jews, led by Moses, fled slavery and captivity in Egypt. This year Passover is especially meaningful because as we celebrate our freedom at home, we are mindful that there remain 59 hostages who were taken from Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 and who are being held captive in the Gaza strip. We pray for their release. For more about the importance of this ritual, I encourage you to listen to this interview with Rachel Polin-Goldberg, whose son Hersch was murdered by Hamas while in captivity. 

At the close of the Seder meal, we sing several traditional songs, including Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), which was the inspiration for the dance (above) by Israeli-born choreographer Ohad Naharin. The song enumerates the Jews' faith, beliefs and traditions, founded in the affirmation of One God and summing up in the recognition of God's thirteen attributes. You can find an English translation here. 

-- sdl

I Cried for You: Harry James & Helen Forrest

 

"Letter to Eve" [by Ruth Homberg]

Letter to Eve

I wanted to make you a
Thesaurus. Feed you words
He defined, and make synonyms
fall from your mouth.

and be options. Remember,
Queen Anne’s Lace was royalty
but now are weeds. On walks
through Eden you would grasp
handfuls and place them in your hair;
as though already you knew
what it was like to be dethroned.

-- Ruth Homberg

 

painting by Masaccio

from the archive; first posted February 10, 2010

Jim Daniels: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Obedience School

 

Near the end, the experts on loss

sold us a robot dog that barked

and leaned into the touch

 

to give comfort to my blind dying

mother. She wasn’t fooled enough

to name it—or gone enough,

 

though she was pretty gone

then. We put it in her hands

and she stroked it

 

then hurled it across the room.

Nothing to lose is never true.

Always something more to lose.

 

I turned the dog off.

Bad dog, I said.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jim Daniels’ most recent collection of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. He has published many collections of fiction; written four produced screenplays; and his collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. He has edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                      Paul Strand, Blind Woman, photogravure, 1912, The J. Paul Getty Museum

The Death of FDR: April 12, 1945

Unfinished portrait of FDR by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff (1888-1980), April 12, 1945

<< President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. He had been inaugurated on January 20th for his unprecedented fourth term as president. He was 63. He looked like a dying man and suffered from very high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, possibly melanoma. He was weakened by post-polio syndrome and the strain of governing the nation during the Great Depression and leadin the allies to defeat the Germans, the Japanese, and Mussolini's Italy.

FDR succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) while at Warm Springs, Georgia, the polio treatment center he had created in the late 1920s. On his prior visits, he had always come away feeling rejuvenated from the exercise and friendships and warm water. He was at home, the Little White House, while sitting for his portrait and chatting with friends. "I've got a terriifc headache," he said. He never regained consciousness. 

An Autobiography in Cookbooks: The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook © 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 13, 2016 at 03:4

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.