Recipe

by Kat White

I found a snapshot the other day.

You in a strawberry red Polo shirt,

your right arm slung like a habit around my shoulders.

Me in a sundress,

grinning into your freckled neck.

Melting grape snoball, crushed ice and sugary syrup, in your left hand,

your hip in my right.

My red hair billowed about my shoulders like a threatening storm, one curlicue

lodged inside the collar of your shirt

Mouth wide, laughing into the camera with a purply tongue,

Overbearing sunglasses shield freckle cheek splatters,

(I tried to count them once while you slept: seven constellations worth).

A proper New Orleans mint julep green house with a balcony of ferns behind us,

Toulouse Street, it looks like.

We were happy.

This must have been taken before you told your brothers at Thanksgiving that I would never be gay enough but I sure knew how to eat pussy (I was in the bathroom and your words came through the air vent) before you called me a worthless drunken whore in our kitchen and heaved a ceramic mug at my head (you never did fix that dent in the wall) before I called you a possessive cuntrag and doused you in balsamic vinaigrette (homemade) before I fucked your hot brother drunk on Abitas (and my own restlessness) before your delicate girl hand thumped my face against the wooden fireplace mantle shutting and purpling my left eye after I came home smelling of sperm (your brother still sends Christmas cards) before I set your 1956 peacock blue Chevy Bel Air Convertible on fire (I only needed one good eye to find the gas can and my lighter) before I laughed through the smoke and explosion

because that’s when we weren’t assholes.




 Kat White is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate and Instructor at the University of Memphis. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Phoebe Journal and Photosynthesis Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Blue Collar Review, Axe Factory, Lullwater Review, and Stone Highway Review; she had an upcoming poem in Fade Poetry Journal. Kat is currently at work in Memphis on her nonfiction novel, A Personal Cartography. Contact her at paris_anais@yahoo.com.