THE RECIPE is a poem written by Marci Calabretta Cancio Bello and visually interpreted by Eleni Tomadaki (Eleni is bored again). Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, and more.
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THE RECIPE
Enter the body’s kitchen, weighted with a jarful of snow to shake into borealis, a deep-bellied pot, and a plastic bag ripe to rip open, stomach filled with many hungers. Scallions. Pork and beans. Canned sausage. Coins of rice cakes. Tofu wet against the knife, the tinny suction of glistening spam. Ramen powder and onions sweeping under the nose. Spark the fire. Fire. Fire.
So much war in this
stew still simmering to warm
wintered throats scraped raw