Collard Greens & Ham Hocks: Or What to Do When the Bills Are Due, and: Pineapple-Coconut Cake, and: In Your Next Life, and: Acts of Submission

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• Collard Greens & Ham Hocks: Or What to Do When the Bills Are Due, and: Pineapple-Coconut Cake, and: In Your Next Life, and: Acts of Submission
• Diamond Forde (bio)

COLLARD GREENS & HAM HOCKS

Or What to Do When the Bills Are Due

INGREDIENTS

3 lbs. collard greens fanned like money

2 tbsp bacon fat pearled in a jar

1 onion

3 ham hocks cleft from rickety knees

4 cups chicken stock

1 dash of Lawry's & an equal amount of salt

1 big pinch of store-brand pepper

1 splash vinegar

your deepest pot

DIRECTIONS

1. 1. Ablute the bunches. Free the greens from their bitter spines, twine them 'round your finger, fret the rugged ends—your Daughters' heads: edges leafing their box braids already, dark hairs wilding like vines—you twist the hairlets, sulfur-handed, a tired thumb drumming their roots. Pray they bloom but not too soon.

2. 2. Dice the onion squinting near the sill. Citrine-silky, the onion flirts, an acrid bustle from its bulbous skirt. Its sharp sting, Vidalia lye—see anyone but you in its blade-worn eye.

3. 3. Start a pot no deeper than an empty pocket. Sauté the onion—clot of grease leaping in the heat. Ham hocks & their jointed knots sizzle drippings. Pray the gas guzzles long enough for the stove to wreathe with heat.

4. 4. Your Daughters ask when they'll see you again. Do not tell them you hook each minimum-wage minute with the sharp end of their frowns.

5. 5. Combine the collards & hocks, the chicken stock, the vinegar & spice.

6. 6. Twice, you dined in the light of home's every candle. The Daughters, bowed heads flamed with wildness, held vigil for the sweat stringing their necks.

7. 7. Braise the collards two hours. Holler for your Daughters pretending the patched toe of their socks struts a stiletto. The borough broadways in midday's spotlight. Who doesn't want to smell Italian leather?

8. 8. Whenever the collards' iron perfumes pennies in the broth, measure the greens in heaps. Eat off whatever you have too much of: paper plates, the divet on the couch where you used to sleep, eat from the dog's ALPO-dusted bowl, eat from their school shoes, rubber peeling back from the soles. [End Page 80]

PINEAPPLE-COCONUT CAKE

why didn't I celebrate you that night : when my cousins leaned across your nursing-home bed to paint your mouth bright pink : who'd know this'd be the last time I could count each opal tooth : pineapple bright as a beachside : tinned for home, aluminum hum still clung to the fruit : on birthdays, you ate the biggest slice of cake : your indefinite origins : doctors unsure if you'd been born July first or fourth : four days you'd eat cake then wait for the country to circle its bonfires, its billowing grills—fireworks flitting their fiery frills : feels like they celebrating me / with me you said : & though you never read poetry, maybe a Clifton song mambas through all us : so strong, I might forget the shape of the hurt I nursed : seeing you for the first time in years : guilt goosed in our necks : none of us loving you enough : to home you : but you had new places to be anyway: your spirit freighted its prayer boat through the phone wires while I, standing in front of you, went hungry for the sweet treat : your smile mashed into doughy cheeks : half-grimace : as if you reigned, even, the corners of your mouth : let that hunger carry me anywhere : the hood of my parents' hatchback, where the two of us leaned back & scooped with plastic spoons the coconut flaking our lips : celebratory stars smoking their multicolored spokes in the night : LOOKDOWN : but the voice is a wish inside me : I dare not : your mouth, smudged into sloppy lipstick—pink as the throat of GOD—bursts through. [End Page 81]

IN YOUR NEXT LIFE

I wish you barefoot in a grass field as beetles scuttle under the sun-splinteredtrunk of a pawpaw tree I wish you autumn as the nearby leaves blushinto red dregs, & the mulch, night-coddled, feeds the marrowof the roots sugar-heavy...