The Summer of My Culinary Soulmate By Marisa Silva-Dunbar

        Trevor Leyenhorst Flickr



The Summer of My Culinary Soul Mate

I don’t know if we shared noodles our first night out,
after spending the afternoon on the river.

We both liked the dark chocolate covered espresso beans
that you kept hidden in your patchwork bag.
I felt unnourished at home, and you too were tired
of cooking and eating alone.

Figs sat in a bowl of brown sugar,
olives in the jar glimmering for the next night’s putanesca.
The onions you chopped looked like pieces of glass in the pan.
The shiraz for the beans, garlic on our fingertips--

I liked your kitchen with the bone white countertops,
the bubbling of golden plums on the stove,
the view of the garden, with all the pink tea roses
and luscious fruit trees, greeted us at the table.

Belly full of shrimp tacos with fresh guacamole,
it was easy to forget how I began summer so lonely.

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Marisa Silva-Dunbar’s work has been published in Rose Quartz Journal, Awkward Mermaid, Spider Mirror Journal, Mojave He[art] Review, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Poetry WTF?!, Better than Starbucks Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, Words Dance Magazine and Gargoyle Magazine. She graduated from the University of East Anglia with her MA in poetry, and has been shortlisted twice for the Eyewear Publishing Fortnight Poetry Prize. She has work forthcoming in Mojave He[art] Review, Sixfold, Pussy Magic, Midnight-lane Boutique, and The Same

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