Sample Poems by Elisabeth Kuhn
Secrets
Why would you want to know where I was
last Saturday night, and with whom doing what?
It’s none of your business or anyone else’s
either. I could have been home making Sauce
Béarnaise for my steak. I could have been doing squat.
Why would you want to know where I was
Sunday afternoon? I was not cutting grass –
there’s no need for that in my 10th floor flat.
It’s none of your business nor anyone else’s
if I was home or out playing with friends because
I’m single. I can do what I want. There’s not
a thing you would want to know. Where I was
when you called and got my machine? My boss
wouldn’t even ask that. If my life had a plot
it would still be none of your business. Nobody else is
asking me. They know better! Maybe I floss
or make love home alone. I might tell you a lot
more than you wanted to know. Why don’t you cross
what’s none of your business off your list? Pretend it’s my loss.
Father’s Kitchen
In some way it had always been my father’s
kitchen. Even when I was in my teens
he’d walk in, sit in his chair, and ask our mother
or whichever daughter was there to make
coffee. “Why don’t you make it yourself?” I’d ask,
and he’d blow up. He was working to pay for all this,
he said, make him coffee was the least we could do,
and play violin for him (he’d paid for those lessons too).
Now he makes coffee for us when we visit,
cooks lunch and dinner. The kitchen’s all his.
Most things are where they’ve always been,
though he’s added a bookcase by his chair
next to the kitchen table, with Reader’s Digest,
medical journals, letters, and books on his favorite
composers. On top, the program guide for the
classical music station, the radio, and pictures
of mother and him, and all of us. He’s also put
plates and bins with cutlery by the window,
where he likes to chop herbs he’s plucked
from the garden (dandelion flowers and leaves,
lemon verbena, parsley, Boretsch, and sage).
I can hear his radio blasting concertos and operas
from my room upstairs. When I enter the kitchen,
he tells me herbs have more vitamins
and minerals than the rest of our lunch
taken together. And he goes on, as he chops
and mixes (“You do like onions and garlic
in your salad, don’t you?”), to lecture me
on the health benefits of the smelly bulbs
(which I know by heart), and about his years
as a student in medical school, when, he says,
his professors were stunned by his near-perfect
memory, about the war and the years he worked
in hospitals at the various places we’d lived,
and why we’d moved. I’ve heard it all before
but I listen as he moves in his green wax-
cloth apron to chop carrots and leeks.
“Would you like coffee?” he asks, then:
“You should put on an apron, so it won’t drip
on your blouse. How about cheesecake?
We still have some left from Sunday. It’s good.
What else can I make you?” We sit in our old
seats. He’s at the head, I’m at the opposite end.
Between us would have been mother,
and my brother and sisters, who live out of town.
Above us the neon lamp buzzes. I can see dark
specks in the brightly lit shade (dead flies –
someone should clean it sometime). And we eat.
Time Out
All fall I worried.
The lump in my breast
didn’t go away.
The mammogram caused
alarm. And the needle biopsy...
It’s probably nothing, my doctor said,
we didn’t find any cancer,
but we still don’t know
why you have the lump.
It has to come out,
of course, but you go
and have a nice Christmas
first. So I went to Germany
where I saw my ex
and made love for the last time
with both of my breasts
intact (he hardly touched
the one with the lump) and I told
my brother, my sister, my friends,
about the scare
that turned out to be
probably nothing.
Musings While I Take Off My Cancer
Socks at 2 a.m.
What’s your sign? I’m a cancer, a crab.
You hardly hear that line anymore – it’s lame.
But I still read my horoscope to grab
an inch of inspiration in that drab
windowless office. Before they knew my name
at singles mixers, they’d ask my sign: Cancer, crab,
child of the moon. It’s amazing what can nab
a man’s attention. Cancers are nurturing, sexy, game
for hope, they think. My horoscope said I should grab
any chance to find romance on the dance floor where fab-
ulous dancers swoon, hope to get what they came
for. My sign’s imprinted on these socks: Cancer, crab.
I’m in my signature mood today, for the lab
report I’m trying to forget on the dance floor came
back as I read in my horoscope I should grab
life by the throat – I answered the phone, not to gab,
for once, but to hear my doctor scramble that same
old line: The signs say I have cancer. The crab
still reads horoscopes for any hope she can grab.
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