The Oven (place as prompt)

100 Poems is still brand new, with all its connotations of wobble and shine, but the comments thread on these posts is quickly becoming one of my favorite online spaces. Thank you to all of you who are sharing your poems and holding one another up! Thank you, too, to the quiet readers among us, gifting attention. I’m so glad that all of you are here.

The Prompt

I have another (optional, as always) prompt for you to play with! Pick a place. It can be a literal, physical place like your office chair or you kitchen, aisle 7 of your favorite supermarket or the bare patch of ground beneath a giant oak in your yard. Or it can be a virtual space—Zoom, the front page of The New York Times, or the quiet recesses of your Tetris app. Once you’ve picked a place, play around with writing more than one poem set in or inspired by this location. To me, the exercise of trying to find more than one sort of poetry, more than one possible perspective, more than one moment of poignancy connected to a single place sounds interesting, challenging, fun, mildly intimidating, and possibly fruitful.

Photo by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

I’m picking my local YMCA. I might even go so far as to narrow further to the sauna. Here’s my first poem inspired by that place. I’ll aim to write and send you another later this week!

My Poem

The Oven 

It is 170 degrees,
hot enough to cook a chicken,
albeit slowly.
We are squeezed together thigh to thigh,
strangers in silence and sweat.
Eyes should be glazed, it’s in
the recipe,
but one man blinks,
and I blink back,
and it all comes out
like so much stuffing—
the words that sit on the tip of his tongue,
the words that pulse in the empty ache
of a chest cavity
that once housed a heart.
Words he can’t stop saying.
Words he never wants to say again. 

Wife.
Dead.
Three months.  

Maybe it’s easier to sweat than it is to cry,
more efficient, too, if the point
is to purge yourself of salt, to burn
through the pain and the burden
of thought, to rid yourself of anything
that tastes like what you’ve lost.

57 years of her, he says. 
And now, he’s donated all her clothes. 
Packed the pictures in brown boxes and
carried them to the attic. 
Her bones are buried an ocean away.
He has time,
so much time. 

And space,
so much space. 

“It’s a whole new life,” he says,
and “I’m learning to cook.”
He smiles brightly, but to me,
the light feels fluorescent,
and if there was a way
to check a person for doneness,
my guess is that his insides
are still quite pink.
But what chicken wouldn’t,
if given the chance,
push the oven open and
insist it’s ready for refrigeration,
or better yet,
the freezer? 

He stands up to go, and I’m relieved—
I’ve heard talk of him around the gym. 
“His wife died, and now he stays too long
in the sauna,” is what they say.
Once an ambulance came, but today
he is steady on his feet. 
He tells me his name before
he pushes the door open,
and I tell him mine before
the door swings shut,

and then I sit alone with the other birds,
their eyes still glazed,
and I think of the words I wish I’d said,
but there are no words
to match my insides, 
and all I can find
is thank you.
Thank you
for letting me
cook
beside you.  
 

I look forward to connecting with you all in the comments again! Please remember that all poems are welcome there; they don't need to be connected to the prompt.