Mouthbrooders

/ Poetry /

There are fish that protect their young

by holding them in their mouths

You are bones pinched between two fingers

I want to keep you

in my cheek

In life you would have tasted like gin

and smoke

There are cultures in South America that ritually eat their dead

During Spanish colonization Queen Isabella commanded none to be enslaved

but those that ate human flesh

There were more cannibals after that.

The Amahuaca people of what is now Peru picked bone fragments from the ashes

and ground them with maize

The morning after Kentucky removes my care from Medicaid

I make grits for the first time I do not live

there it is the first wave of a coming tide

The nation turns us over in its mouth

decides if it will swallow

I watched an angelfish in captivity consume its eggs

Wild animals will eat their young in times of scarcity

Inside them is a calculation: the offspring’s chance of survival

against their nutritional need

In famine

we are all calories

This isn’t that.

I make them the way you would have

Salted water, lots of butter—more. More than that.

They taste plain I make too many

Grits are a thick porridge made of cornmeal, but the article about the Amahuaca

calls it gruel

There is more to this distinction than consistency.

The Muscogee introduced the dish to colonists in the seventeenth century

it quickly became a staple of the impoverished South

Like poverty, grits are adaptable

to any meal any occasion

Sweet grits, shrimp and grits,

funeral grits.

I read an article about the environmental impacts of scattering ashes.

Diana said, “there is no ecologically safe way to mourn.”

Rubbing the ashes between thumb and forefinger

they are coarse like crushed coral in an aquarium

I think maybe she is wrong.

I part my lips and press my fingers

to my tongue