Poetry Suite by Angel Kofsky
“I know when I say I’m nonbinary
the first thing people do
is look at my beard”
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You Are What You Eat
Food has always been my family’s love language.
To us there is no purer way to say i love you than
"You are so hungry,
here,
eat."
And, if you are what you eat, I would be
mac'n'cheese,
fried okra,
and my unresolved feelings
about family and food:
a plate piled high with all the fixings it takes
to cover the aftertaste
of leftover resentment
baked into my father’s ribs
– bone in and deep soaked
in a bud light and bourbon gravy –
too refined to go back to a small town kitchen,
too homegrown and simple
to fit on the menu of a big city restaurant
where you look up at night
and can't see all the stars.
I learned love as
my father’s macaroni and cheese
as my mother’s fried okra
my grandmother’s blackberry cobbler,
which we picked fresh
on the side of a dirt road
walking hand in hand with my grandfather.
But I also learned love as service
as devour
as minding your manners
and cleaning your plate
no matter what is set down in front of you.
I picture a performance
around a thanksgiving table:
my rainbow chiffon
coated in gray icing erasure
to blend in at a potluck
overflowing with deep-fried southern comfort
which I would not be allowed to touch
if I showed up queer and left wing and alive.
If you are what you eat
I am what’s been eating me:
a reflection of tables
as chopping blocks
where I carved away
the most tender parts of me
to meat their expectations.
Almost lovers, so-called
family and fairweather friends –
to whom I handed my heart,
a well-groomed garçon,
ever so eager to say:
“You are so hungry.”
"Here."
“Eat.”
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Papercuts
I cut my beard in the shower today
with a pair of cheap craft scissors
I bought at the dollar tree.
I didn’t want to, of course,
but with the way masks fit
and the way pandemics kill people
I didn’t really have a choice.
I know when I say I’m nonbinary
the first thing people do
is look at my beard
like it is some kind of proof
I must be trying to claim something
that doesn’t really belong to me,
like my identity
or my name
or my body.
But sometimes when you’re nonbinary
it’s nice to get to look in a mirror
without seeing something God got wrong.
And for as much as you might think
a beard would make me feel more like a man,
it still covers a face I can’t decide if I hate more
for looking so little like a woman
or so much like my father.
It's funny the way craft scissors work —
they don’t actually “cut” anything
because the blades are far too dull.
What they actually do
is create more and more tension
while allowing less and less
freedom of movement
until eventually
there's nowhere left to go
without splitting in half.
I think my body is like that somehow —
a pair of craft scissors trembling against my throat,
jagged edges closing in tighter and tighter
until there is nothing left to do but cleave,
sever my story into a binary
only a mother could love.
And she does love
every piece of him.
She tells ‘him’ ‘he’ is ‘good man’.
‘Him’ like grandmother’s gospel
‘Man’ like two sheets of hard steel
sliding, a plastic-coated guillotine —
‘He’ clips the moon to make me a son for her
and 32 years of papercraft
burst from my eyes
like a thousand paper cranes,
watching scraps fill the basin
of a too-long shower
like I hadn’t known this performative trim
was going to feel familiar,
another part of me I had to give up
for comfort and safety.
When it is done
I turn the heat up on the faucet
and then
I turn the heat up on the faucet
and then
I turn the heat up on the faucet:
offer up my skin
to a chrome plated goddess
on a showerhead alter
like ‘she’ might burn the man off me
before I have to face a mirror again
and she wouldn’t
and she doesn’t
and she can’t
but knowing it will hurt me
I do it anyway.
I have to.
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Plovers
I've been thinking a lot lately
about those birds who clean the teeth
of alligators,
the ones the gators don't eat
because they understand
the birds are there to help them.
It’s kind of romantic, in a way,
the symbiosis.
The birds show up any time they are needed;
the gators get their teeth cleaned
so they don't rot out of their mouths.
And, aside from the free meal,
the birds get to feel safe for a while
because, honestly
what kind of idiot fucks with an alligator?
You've got to figure though,
it has to happen sometimes,
where one of those birds
sticks its head in the mouth of a gator
who hasn’t learned the value
of that kind of relationship…
What happens next is terrible.
It's unfair and ugly and wrong,
and maybe even a little bit cruel
but none of that will stop it from happening.
The gator won't understand
because it hasn't learned enough yet;
all it knows is hunger,
and then hunting,
and then full –
so it does what a hungry, hunting,
empty thing does
to a bird who has so much more to offer
than a quick easy meal
but this absent-minded predator,
this mass of leather and teeth
will never apologize,
will never give the bird a second thought,
or even regret the awful thing it did
because eventually,
when its jaw starts to ache
and it gets tired
of feeling empty all the time
and it finally has to learn…
It will just find a new bird.
Like none of this ever even happened.
See, to the bird,
this moment was calamity,
a clipped wing catastrophe
that changed everything forever
but to the gator,
it was just another meal
and it wouldn’t be their last
so there’s no reason
any of it ever has to matter to them.
I guess what I am trying to say is
I don't hate you.
But late at night
when the shades are drawn,
when I've turned off all the lights
and I'm lying in bed
next to someone whose soft hands
welcome me into a kinder jaw…
I hate the way
I miss your teeth.
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On Loving Someone's Leftovers
This is going to sound crazy,
but,
if food is a love language
I want you to love me
like I’m leftovers.
Give me that carry out,
take me home and scrape the sides love.
The kind of love that savors the long nights
we rested on the tips of our tongues,
eager to taste
but never in a rush to swallow.
Give me a lover
who eats a reheated curry on monday
and remarks on how the rice
is so much more tender
once it soaks up the tikka masala.
Give me moments I could marinate with,
steady like the slow sizzle
after the flash in the pan –
let them settle in the stomach,
stretch my belly like too much spaghetti
or a lifetime of too much laughter,
and if the lines on our faces
are called laugh lines
I’ll set my table for a love
with crinkle cut eyes
and a lazy thursday updo;
watching the way love
wrinkles as it ages
but is always still trying
just a little.
Give me this love,
one that folds me less like a napkin
and more like a blessing,
and I will begin counting
the ways love has made a meal out of me…
I have known
the birthday cake kind of love,
been passed through
so many fork-and-knife hands,
I have known
that sick and sweet sugar high love,
that so-good so-fast upset-stomach-
make-you-shake kind of love.
I don't want to do that here
so if you’re set on loving me
love me like a casserole
love me like a fruitcake
love me like that box
you stuck in the back of the fridge
because after the first bite
you knew you were going to want to have me again.
Love me
like prying the lid from a Tupperware
you tucked in your icebox
Love me
tomorrow.
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Header image courtesy of Erik Jones. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
For more of Angel’s poetry, read their previous feature here.
Former Java Monkey Grand Slam champion, Angel Kofsky was born of a family of chefs, bakers, line cooks, homemakers and is a former chef themself. Angel has always held a deep emotional and often spiritual relationship with food. At times though, that relationship has been a complicated one. For all the joy and love they have found in the sharing of meals, they also battled EDNOS, mourned their love of recipes tied to abusers and lost loved ones, and experienced hunger to the point of starvation.
"For being so mundane, food is a strange and powerful substance. It's both personal and political, universal and cultural, people have been oppressed by the lack of it while tyrants have been brought down by using it as a weapon. This non static need we are all connected by brings sickness as easily as health, pain as easily as joy, and we all have our own stories connected to it. These are a few of mine."
Currently, they are working on a new chapbook themed around the grief, reclamation, and celebration of their relationship with food and mealtime, which is set to be released early 2021.
