Mustard, Milk, and Gin
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About this ebook
Megan Denton Ray
Megan Denton Ray received her MFA from Purdue University, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared recently or will soon in Poetry, The Sun, Salt Hill Journal, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, and elsewhere.
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Mustard, Milk, and Gin - Megan Denton Ray
KETCHUP & MUSTARD
"Sometimes I wanted to go and live in a place apart forever,
a place where I could roll around in the dirt and lick things."
—Lauren Slater
HEAVEN HILL
What is the sound of a child remembering herself? Dry-salt
of my past, retrieval of my edges: am I finally at the top
of a long gravel driveway? Is my father out again
with his articulate shovel and dump-truck? My mother:
fixing the brown box mashed potatoes. Me in plaids,
florals, prints. There are cows across the street.
I stand beneath a cumulus cloud—feeling no joy,
no deliverance. I stare ahead, a chilly blonde speck
with pointy elbows and milk teeth. Did I know then that
my parents dragged their warm bellies over the earth to feed me?
Did I know that my father buried a bottle of whiskey
in the backyard? My mother: an iris bulb in the freezer.
I’m not them I tell myself. I’m not them. The silver bodies
of our sprinklers emerge and contort. They scream
from every blowhole. See, this is the sound of my father
returning from the fields, barreling his dump-truck down
that gravel driveway—a stunt, like Jesus swinging his hips.
Producing a penny from behind my ear.
A MOTH NAMED KOMATSU
It’s true. One of my first words
was komatsu. The black and gold
bulldozer. The little pine tree
in Japanese. The moth that ate
the caterpillar, I was told—though
I’ve found no evidence for this, Audubon
or elsewhere. I was in my car seat
in the back of a forest green
Lincoln Town Car. My grandpa Pete,
President of Power Equipment Company
pointed them out as we drove by. Komatsu.
Komatsu. Meg, can you say komatsu? I did.
The moth that ate the caterpillar. The moth
was black and gold—this excavation queen,
this flint-colored cocoon. Copper eyes,
feathered antennae. She came toward me
with pine needles in her mouth. She nuzzled
my cheek like a great scaled cat. I stroked
her wings. Pretty girl, pretty girl. Come
and see the family. Come and see
my runaway bundle: my dillydallies, red shoes.
JEWEL TEA
Heaven is a kitchen full of jadeite dishes. It’s here,
inside our little brick house on Grigsby Chapel Road.
I am wearing my overalls, the ones made of
buttercream corduroy. I am four, standing
beside my mother, on a stool at the stove, still
I am barely tall enough to peer into the big, deep pot—
its waters gurgling, its copper bottom blazing. Yes,
heaven is here, and I am unwrapping the five or six
Kraft cheese slices from their plastic sheaths, carefully
folding them into tiny squares for my mother’s macaroni.
I put my squares into exquisite piles, while my mother
stirs and stirs with her long wooden spoon, one hand
at her other hip, massaging. I wait for her to pour