Elizabeth Cohen

Goulash

I’m preparing for the end of the world
again, which is to say I am making
goulash, which is to say I am mixing
up everything leftover from the week
and slapping it with a fancy Hungarian
name, which is to say I am tired

I am planning to feed my daughter
and her three or maybe four friends
this concoction because I have convinced
myself it is better than peanut butter toast
which is to say I am cleaning out the refrigerator again
which is to say I like to see them eat

I add in a few wands of asparagus, the last
of the noodles, and cheese, always cheese
because everyone knows children love cheese
and I love children eating cheese, their small mouths
opening and closing over and over so predictably
the way every day becomes a night, eventually

I think of the insides of them, making sense of beets
and pasta, of chicken strands, and slips of onion
the way each one of them will make sense someday
of snow caked walkways, of books left out in rain
and heartbreak which is to say I like the way they chew

Someday, they will encounter bullies
they will feed their own parents soup,
and possibly hold someone’s hand as they die
They will have paper cuts
which is to say they will bleed
but for today, they will eat my goulash
which is what I call this stir fried everything

I like to think I am feeding them a few ways
to prepare for the end of the world here
which is necessary these days
which I have to say makes me tired somehow
which is to say they will need more
than all their beauty to get by

 

When I Was a Bird

I had the smallest bones
I could breaststroke on the smooth back of evening
I had no particular anger

Sometimes I made a meal of rain’s leftover wheat
I found certain beetles enticing
I loved fish

There was a time when I sang
to a smaller bird
for days

There was a time when
I pierced the skin of a lake
and left mud tracks

on asphalt
I’ve let my shadow follow other shadows
into the quicksand of night

I’ve slept among sandflies
and fallen down on the miracles
of road-killed mice

After, I evolved into a mongoose
the smallest springbok of a large herd
a wildebeest, a Talaud flying fox

but I never forgot my ancestry
of feather and flock
It was my best life of all, and my

most successful
I was married to air
and my hatchlings followed me

everywhere, until one day
they left to marry the wind
themselves and became tree frogs

and pink fairy armadillos
and little girls
in India, with parasols

 

Elizabeth Cohen is an associate professor of creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and the editor of Saranac Review. Her poems have been published by Yale Review, Northwest Review, River Styx, Calyx and Exquisite Corpse. Her book of poems, Bird Light, was a co-winner as best poetry book by Adirondack Center for Writing in 2017.