“What's That Smell in the Kitchen?”

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lambchops in Peoria: it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago:
tofu delight in Big Sur; red

rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning

food they're supposed to bring with calico

smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined

but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything

it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly

ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Marge Piercy