Homemade gazpacho, jade basil,

bowl of rosy figs. I thought of her today

when I bought French yogurt

​

in demure plastic cups, deciding

this must be how Parisians stay thin.

You can have too much of a good thing,

​

like Colorado sunshine that sucks the forest dry.

Wildfires up north pack my backyard

with ash. I don't know what possessed me

​

to move this far west. I come from a line

of eastern women—Unami maiden on one side,

seventeenth-century Salem witch on the other

​

(she was that devastating force, a woman

who spoke her mind). I wish I'd been there,

listening as she told her accusers, come forward,

​

while deep in New England woods, light

stuttered among foxglove and hemlock

before granting darkness the decisive win.

​

I was born afflicted with hesitation.

Not my aunt, who's always planted herself

with the underdog and freak, which is to say

​

with me, in days of my divorce, when depression

strained my seams. She muddled mint for mojitos,

let me cry it out beneath her guest bedroom duvet.

​

It's twenty-twenty now, year of zeros, the world

starved for beauty. I scroll through her feed:

peppers roasted, rich saffron stew. Her kitchen

​

is morgue and resurrectory. On her table,

orange begonias. Hair tied back, my aunt

casts the pinch of pink and crucial salt.

​

​