Food and Writing

My students are writing food poems this weekend, and they're already posting them to our Ning site. They're awesome. They inspired me to write my own little funny piece about a memory of mine from long ago. When Mama was trying to make homemade plum jam. Here it is:

when mama burned her belly makin jelly

a ripe plum doesn't look delicious at all, more like a pruny peach or moldy moro and, when you're ten and your fingers are sticky and you don't have a basket so you fold your hyper-color t-shirt up to form a bowl, the heat of Mississippi August turning the colors blue to green, you especially think those plums are disgusting

it doesn't help that mama's sweaty and yelling for you to hurry as she skins the soft fruits and boils the water for mason jars and you're hearing the lids go POP POP POP and you peel your dirty bare feet from the sugar water floor, all syrup sounds. And then a misstep: and a YOOOOWWWW and then those same colors, tortured tangerine and blood red

and mama becomes the skinned plum