Recipes Poem by Katrina Harms

The creak of hinges
upon opening my mother's recipe box
its stale contents amok, oil and batter stained
Familiar.
And the wondrous half hope that
like a jinn from a lamp,
it would yield a ghost of old.
But therein dwell only musty torn-from-newspaper recipes,
(when they made fonts small and delicate as lace hoops)
and each ingredient a gram and a litre, pinches
and hearty scoops.
Mine is the wobbly, earnest scrawl.
Verbose and impossible, my mulberry buns
were the pride of my kitchen. Yield 3 dozen.
And then her small, unimposing cursive,
legible barely in each swoop and dive,
you wish you knew what it meant.
That last tiny blue word, and you
press two dry lips to that paper,
like the smell of saplings and dusty Estee Lauder,
she was there,
and her pen scraped there once.
Sacred.
Watermelon pickles and Québécois preserves,
she warns the rhubarb leaves are poisonous.
You think you've seen a window,
but it's only a box, and time has changed nothing
for a vast
unending
moment.