Poetry

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.