Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio
Once I had a friend who shared my love of strong flavors. We would buy things like kimchee and Limburger cheese and pesto that was mostly garlic and sit at the small kitchen table in the 4th-floor walkup I shared with my sister eating it. You two and your stinky food!, my sister would say, and she was right. Intensity is a good thing when it comes to food. And gin, the kind where you can taste all the plants and flowers and life that’s been infused into it: bay and juniper and sage, dry sunshine air. “Whatever’s your most botanical,” is what I say to the bartender when they ask. I don’t care if there’s a heaven and I don’t believe anyone who tells me there are rules for getting into it, because why does it matter? This is the world we live in. This is our hell and our heaven, this world right here, the one with the Limburger and the pesto and the St. George terroir. Which is why I love this poem, by the great Kim Addonizio, a woman who has never been afraid of strong flavors.
For Desire, by Kim Addonizio
Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world.
For more information on Kim Addonizio, please visit her website.
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This poem keeps drawing me to it, or it to me, and I don’t know why. The last two lines come back to me when I wake up at night, or sometimes when I’ve been walking or hiking for a long time. I don’t know where I found this poem, or where it found me. Sometimes when I read it, the hard times, I feel like a child who doesn’t know what she did wrong, why she’s being yelled at, a child who would do anything to be better and to make it better. Other times I feel a huge relief, a letting-go, as though the you in the poem, in the ending three lines, has finally found me and I don’t have to keep trying anymore. 
Once, at the end of a book club discussion held in the library of a women’s prison, the women (who are addressed as “offenders” on the prison P.A. system, as in, “Offenders, cell check in fifteen minutes”) took turns asking me personal questions from a list they had prepared. I remember only one of them: “
Six saggy old cardboard boxes full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of handwritten or typed letters sit behind closed cupboard doors in my bedroom. These letters date back to high school. They’re from my mother, my grandmothers, my sisters, my brother, boys and men I loved, my best friend, other dear friends, and friends I barely remember but who were important to me at one point in my life. The envelopes, with those wavy lines across the canceled stamps, bear testament to all the places I’ve lived in my life. Unlike almost anything else in my life, I can’t throw them out. Sometimes they have lived in the dark trunk of my car until once again they are hauled into a different cupboard in a new house or apartment, where they rest in darkness next to their neighbors. The other day I opened a box at random and pulled out a letter from my grandmother. She had been to a movie with my parents and what an interesting, if confusing, movie it had been. Afterward they had gone to a Chinese buffet and my parents had treated her, how lovely of them. She was having trouble with that darned knee of hers. And then came this ending line, reminiscing about my grandfather, dead many years at this point: What a beautiful life we had together, but it wasn’t long enough. My grandmother, and that single, uncharacteristic sentence from her, written in the shaky Palmer script of her very old age, is why I love this poem so much.
Last week the painter had a dream in which an old friend, dead in an instant two years ago now, appeared, smiling and so happy to see him. Do you think he came back because he died so fast and he wanted to say goodbye to you? I asked him when he told me about the dream. Who knows? Maybe, the painter said. Either way it was good to see him, happy and healthy. W.S. Merwin has always been a poet of dreams to me, what with his imagery and the way his unpunctuated poems float on the page. His calm voice drifts across the water, and sometimes one of his poems feels exactly right.
That photo over there to the right is the very long tail of a very large rat that ran over my bare feet as I stood at the stove cooking dinner. The story behind the tail is one of intrigue and horror – me sauteeing vegetables at the stove while chatting with The Painter who was seated behind me, me suddenly feeling a squirrel or a small cat run over my bare feet, me shrieking and whirling around to tell The Painter that a squirrel or a cat had run over my bare feet, The Painter trying desperately to contain his horror because he had witnessed exactly what ran over my bare feet and rats are not cats. 
Yesterday I sprinkled some sliced almonds into a small pan and turned the flame on low. I stood beside the stove watching over the pan and occasionally flipping the almonds so that they would brown evenly and not burn. When they were dark golden I shook a little sugar over them and stirred until they were caramelized. Then I turned the almonds out onto a plate to cool and took the pan over to the sink. The sink is a strange, cheap, plasticky thing, scarred from hot pans, so I held the pan up to the faucet and ran water in it to cool it down first. The water hit the pan and steam billowed up into my face. Suddenly I was breathing in vaporized sugar – I could feel it in my lungs and taste it as it went down. It was the most amazing sensation. I stood there by the sink and thought, All these years I’ve been alive and this has never once happened to me before. Then I thought of this poem, which I have secretly treasured ever since I first read it because I love how words, if you toss them around in your mind and on your tongue, turn surprising and magical in that same alchemical way. 
Alison McGhee 