The Poem on the Back of a Grocery List That Saved My Week
My mother wrote it while she was cooking. I found it years later.
My mother wrote on the backs of things. Grocery lists, receipts, the backs of envelopes, the margins of the newspaper. She wrote while she was cooking, while she was waiting for the kettle, while she was on the phone. The writing was not a thing she did; it was a thing that happened while she was doing other things.
I found the poem on the back of a grocery list, years after she died. The list was from 1998, a Tuesday, the usual items: milk, eggs, flour, the kind of list she wrote every week. On the back, in pencil, was a poem about the kitchen window.
It was about the way the light came through the window in the morning, the way it hit the counter where she chopped the vegetables, the way it made the steam from the kettle visible. It was about the specific way the kitchen sounded when she was alone in it, the hum of the fridge and the tick of the clock and the sound of her own breathing.
I read it standing in the kitchen where it had been written, the same window, the same counter, the same light. The poem was not about the kitchen. It was about the woman who had been alone in it for forty years, who had found the time to write a poem on the back of a grocery list because the poem was the thing she could not say out loud.
I keep the grocery list in a frame now. The list is on the front; the poem is on the back. The frame is the proof that the best poems are not the ones that are meant to be read. They are the ones that are written in the margins of a life, on the back of a grocery list, while the kettle is boiling and the vegetables are waiting.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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