Abby E. Murray

Because Nothing Says Sorry About Your Hopelessness Like Chicken Enchiladas

After my father died on purpose,
my husband’s boss’s spouse, the colonel’s wife,

sent me a message to ask when she could
drop off some meatballs. I wrote back

to tell her I’m a vegetarian and what I needed
was someone to teach me how to be alone

in a new city thousands of miles
from where I felt loved, but she didn’t respond.

Between army wives, there are rules
taught only by silence: you get meatballs

or nothing. Years later, when I had aged
into becoming a colonel’s spouse myself

and attended wife school, I was told
that my objective is to make others think I am friendly,

which can be done by simply bringing cookies
and casseroles to the injured or bereaved.

A major’s wife confessed she was relieved:
she didn’t like death or being around people

who grieve: it’s just not my thing, she said,
and the other wives wrote something down

in their notebooks, but what? Permission
to cook without caring? A recipe for recoil?

I often wonder: what must it be like
to carry all the death we’ve known, alone?

War, for some, I suppose, is a dish they can
push away, a bloody soup destined

to blister some other throat. Why concern yourself
with so many boiled bones and bitter roots

when those with the right to blame you
for their pain are too busy choking to say so?

This might be a good time to reassure the reader
that I believe in the healing nature of food,

its preparation and reception, the rhythmic
meditation of kneading bread and the joy

of spilling wine over a hot pan of rice that’s been
fed only onions and butter. But I would sooner

sob into the perfect slice of cake than leave
a stranger I knew was lost exactly where she was.

I would rather show up on your doorstep
empty-handed and make nothing from your sadness

except a pan of sorrow big enough to share
than leave you with lasagna and loneliness

and the certainty that I am, for what it’s worth,
which is shit, friendly. Even the colonel

who married me complains about how much time
he says I waste on feeding those who do not pay me,

and maybe those are the wars he ingested
talking, maybe it’s the deployments

when they never had enough to eat
that keep clawing up his stomach. And if that’s true,

it’s true. Fine. My kitchen is the size of however much
sky fits above my head. My table seats all of us,

plus you. I cannot spare one minute
for manners when there is so much unspeakable

wreckage yet to be collected and sliced into ribbons
the width of countless single days. Let’s roll

your loss up in tiny blankets made of corn
then smother them in cheese, let’s roast

your recurring nightmare for as long as it takes,
let’s pour chili crisp like lava over the top

of every absence and emptiness you can name
then eat with our fingers, staining both our hands.

Go get the heaviest knife you own. I’m bringing chocolate.
I’m bringing dark coffee. We’ll stay up all night.

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