Recipes-III

 Here is one more poem in a series about my mother.

Recipes-III

Mom sliced apples into a pie,

added sugar, cinnamon and butter by rote,

blotted her eyes and got on with crimping

                                                         the crust.

Concerns about my brother

              being kicked out of college

                                    latticed into the pastry.

Kneaded bread absorbed hassles

      over adolescent curfews,

           access to car keys.

She ruled in the kitchen. When Mom

wished to discuss curfew violations

or had concerns about our wanderings

she did so in her realm. Her patience

usually measured.

But once I saw her smack my sister

with a cookie sheet for talking back.

Cookbooks laced with recipes

and memoirs fascinated her.

A stockpot for emotions

               frowned upon as a child

                                  and stifled as an adult.

Her teardrops

             salting more than one batch

                                                  of brownies. 

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor    

Vaccination Hesitation

With the hubbub over Covid and now monkeypox it is easy to lose sight of viruses that are already part of our world until they hit home.

Vaccination Hesitation

What nasty rash skirted my eye?

The fates against falling ill had

favored me: no shingles shot marred

my schedule. But blotches now sullied

my visage and panicked my partner

to the clinic where we both tried to needle

the varicella virus from scoring again.

In the wake of my mistaken calculation,

I swear I heard an oddsmaker snicker,

and I swallowed days of misery.

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor