Balloon

Because she’d lost her sense of taste and smell 
from years and years of smoking, not COVID, 
we’d always have dinner with words. 
They were like troops called up to reinforce a line, 
draftees: green, nervous, pinching themselves— 
the war was hardly going well. 
I worked, we decided, for Gourmet Magazine 
and had to bring to life the food on her plate. 
At least the wine she could feel in her body, 
in her brain. One glass, two… 

“Start by reading the recipe aloud.”
Crumbly Chicken: Six chicken breasts, pounded; 
six English Muffins, shredded; four teaspoons 
of Worcestershire Sauce; two tablespoons of olive oil; 
two tablespoons of Dijon Mustard, one stick of butter.
“Now, poem it up!” she’d say, stealing a line 
from my Iraqi colleague who once conscripted 
me into a translation project, though I didn’t 
know a word of Arabic. “Your job,” he said, 
“is to turn this rough transliteration into art.” 

(Language like an untethered balloon rising 
into the atmosphere. When will it pop?)
“OK, Mom. How about this?” Like old Venetian 
plaster, in a ruin of the mouth, bitter’s blossom 
turned buttery balm. “Not bad,” she’d say, 
“but you can do better. Now how about a memory 
you associate with this chicken? Something juicy.” 
“Well, there’s the time you threw it against 
the wall—you were so mad at your husband— 
and it stuck for a moment or two, 

hung there like a feminist art installation.”
“I’m tasting it!” she’d shout. ’I’m tasting it!”
This is what death is like, I thought yesterday 
standing by the stove. You lose your senses, 
all of them, and your loved ones have to play 
this silly game. Which is why I wait 
for the ink-jet printer, that lumbering ambulance 
with its stridor moan, to spit out these words 
so that I might hold her like a medic in sound. 

Ralph James Savarese | Contents
Mudlark No. 82 (2025)