Sticky bun girls and the tornado burger.

My uncle taught me how to be a sticky bun girl
and we plunged elbow-deep into diners to
fold paper napkins on our laps 
like clergy-- like the holy union 
of spinning diner stools and steak-cut fries.
Defeated tornado burgers spun wild and free-verse
and cursing about the steam off the grill--
Blue tooth-pick tassels on our sandwiches we
let hamburger buns talk about the wars they 
harvest purple hearts from
-- let the ketchup
complain about the sidewalk 
and the sauteed peppers  
muse about the bench in the alley where the chef
sits to smoke a cigarette when the line
out the door of Letterman's diner thins around noon--
We made pickle-poetry-- paged
past the flyleaf of our napkins and 
bound up each meal with mints
spinning us both like windmills
on the hump-backs of the corn fields--
breaching at sunset and calling to their
mothers for hashbrowns--
We could all be food poets if they didn't
teach us to sit like LADIES
eat like LADIES
throw up in a bathroom sink like LADIES
learn to order salads at a diner like LADIES
hide from tornado burgers in the 
cellar like LADIES
peel off the outer most edge of a sticky
buns like LADIES do and give the rest 
to a man who earned his place in poetry--
No there are no LADY-poets
only poets who had been called LADIES--
Had menus scold them 
when they were ten to not lick 
the bottom of a bowl of tomato soup--
to be tape measured and led into the cellar
to let the tornado burgers pass overhead--
pull sauteed peppers from their hair--

Before they learn how
to talk I want to teach my children
to eat-- speak-pronounce proclaim
the words scraped from a grill with a spatula and
pulled writhing from hot tubs of sunflower oil--
the poetry of
our teeth and hands and mouths and 
tongues-- 
I will stand on the dining table and 
tell them to throw their utensils
on our kitchen floor-- 
Beat the bellies of the pasta pots
with forks--flick spoons
at the fine china--
we never needed china plates anyway 
because there was never a wedding--
We only ever
needed our hands. 
Burned diner menus that offered us
salads--
My children will say "Where's our mother and
where's our father and where are
the wedding pictures set out on the 
coffee table like a trophy?"

I will tell them they told me to 
sit like a LADY and eat like a LADY
I will say
my uncle tried to teach me to be a sticky bun girl--
I had triumphed in tornado burgers
with paper napkins on my lap--
licked glaze from my
wrists and used my fingers as soup ladles
and they will call me kitchen sink
They will call me sunflower oil
and ketchup and when I bake brownies
they will hear whole kitchen smell
like broken china plates--

I want my children to think about
food like poem-- write sorrow into
their jaw bones and eat the brownies
that remind them of the mothers they
never had.
Sit like a dinosaur I'll say 
Eat like a tornado
Share steak-cut fries in the cellar
spear sandwiches with blue tooth-pick tassels
and spin yourself on the diner stool
to the core of the sticky bun--