Death Loves Soup Poem by Matt Mullins

How is it that death loves soup
best here in my kitchen, drinking alone
with a pot bubbling on the stove?

Is it because death
hates the small things:
the way Megan pins her hair back

fatally nailing the sweet curve
of her jaw line to my memory
or maybe the way I dice celery just so?

Perhaps both, or neither, only
I still taste the onion tears and fear gone
rotten to liquid in a dark tin box.

I’d rather explode than be heated
slow to boiling, a lobster's sleep and this much
death knows. Better to sit with my wife

who has just now walked into the room
the two of us, together in this kitchen
imagining our lives to the sound of shattering glass
or dove's cooing us toward the guess of what’s left.

No. This: our staring out the window
into all that will come next
while blowing steam off the circle
of a wooden spoon.