WHAT THE SCHOOLS TEACH

by Vanessa Raney

So the secret
– what the schools teach –
is rolling the
meat with oil, fingers
wet, before
you slip it in, warm, the
pan covering.

IN A BURNING KITCHEN

by Vanessa Raney

I was a spoiling stool
of inattention,
an epiphany needling
in indifference.

I wouldn't have,
but I did,
waste those years
in calamity, where I

laid a brickwork of
reclamation in this
other country, where
her laxation

reminds me of mine,
as I take her
ministrations
in a burning kitchen,

cutting the raw,
rolling the flour-
dipped gnoki,
an exclamation for

my need to cook,
the succor of my life that
is an absent ode to my
mother, on exiting.