Summer Desserts by Monique Kluczykowski

​Summer Desserts

The rhubarb not as good as my mother’s—nor can I 
make her wine pudding—smooth and delicate

from roughened hands with thick
blue veins that threw a clot or many—erasure

of recipes and faces. She knew some--
my daughter’s Ariel-red hair, my patient sister,

I the anonymous portrait in a staged house
stripped of souvenirs.

Hospice is endless ministers and hams arriving hourly--
is your mother religious? How would I know, now. 

One brings a guitar, wants to sing—she liked music. The old hymns
comfort and gut.

My applesauce is not right either—she boiled and stirred
special green apples from Indiana

round and round with a wooden spoon
smooth through a sieve, smooth as her face

wearing makeup for the first time
in that cold room in August.

​

Monique Kluczykowski is a first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in Germany. She has lived in Texas, Kentucky, and California, has worked as a band roadie, waitress, warehouse picker, and taught English for many years at Gainesville College in Georgia. She now makes her home in Iowa City. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her most recent poems appear in Belletrist, Sierra Nevada Review, StepAway Magazine, and RabbleLit. Her most recent creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review (2018 Flash CNF contest winner) and has been published in The Examined Life Journal.

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