Pot Roast by Fran Schumer

Pot Roast

Of course I threw out the pot
this heavy old rusty pot I bought
before I was married, a mother
a person, anything —
what was I thinking?
I was thinking I’ll never cook again
moving is dying
we were selling the house
where we raised our children
where I cooked the pot roast
in this heavy pot
that I tossed into the dumpster
bequeathed to Joe Junk
our recyclable lives.
And here we are years later
and I need the damned pot
to make the same roast
that made my husband smile,
gave pleasure to our children,
now grown and gone.
A friend says it’s the same great roast
and I smile because I know
I didn’t use the same pot.
We moved and I didn’t die.

*

Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in The North American Review, The Nation, various sections of The New York Times and other publications. In 2021, she won a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. Her Chapbook, Weight, was the first runner up in the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest and was published in 2022. New poems are forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review and an anthology published by Spell Jar Press. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political science at college but wishes she had spent more time studying Keats.