Salvation Menu

A biscuit with specks of black pepper.
Warm beets and cool plums together
under shaved fennel. Maybe you think
food is only fuel, as simple as shoveling
coal into the maw of a steamboat’s engine,
filling the brood mare’s trough with hay.

This isn’t wrong, but it misses so much.
Trout over steaming jasmine rice, crisp-fried
skin, the rosy flesh. A roasted red pepper sauce
swirled to coat the hollow-core lengths
of spaghetti, garnished with breakfast radish,
its sweet-hot circles magenta and white.

Broccolini, grilled onions. Maybe you think
food is merely domestic, utilitarian: good
for spouses, children, parents, cousins,
then clean the kitchen, that’s enough. But no,
there are places where sweet corn and meatloaf
are solace, comfort, illumination, where flavor

equals amazement, beauty, the whole an oasis,
a haven, a life where hands do the work of love
and plates are offered to everyone, spring
into summer, to fall, where the egg white
in a blackberry sour comes from a chicken
you may someday meet. This, too, is true

political action, devoted tenacious participation
in saving the world: every rinsed drinking glass,
each greeting to someone who drove quite a way
through an ancient landscape to get here, to sit
with strangers in company, weapons aside, joined
by slices of pear gingerbread doused in caramel.

                       — for Blake & Jen & Hells Backbone Grill

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This is a Love Story

We are stripping lavender, two at the kitchen table,
thumbnails turning faintly green, while another shortens
the sleeves of a Chinese blouse at the shoulder seams,
close work, high summer, talking about whether kumquats
will freeze outdoors at our elevation and should be taken
in and he calls from the next room, having heard us
and looked it up: They’re good down to 20 degrees.
This is a love story. Shared work after a home-made lunch,
Saint André and fresh tomatoes, deviled eggs slightly
squashed on the drive through the river canyon,
our conversation threading among steady friends, needle
and golden embroidery floss, the lavender picked last week
and not quite dry so the oils explode as we pinch florets
from the square stems. Have you looked at lavender
closely, lately? English is better than French for scent,
French best for cooking. All four of us know that in nature
a grayer leaf means the plant tolerates drought, no one
has to look it up, we are well aware of the bigger picture,
our future balanced on El Niño and the continuing
bark beetle destruction of pines, hot north winds
and rainless midnight lightning. The ice melts in our glasses,
condensation beading to stream down the sides. Yes,
I asked him what the true name of lavender buds might be
and he looked that up, too, I wouldn’t have thought florets.
Some later day we will make sachets out of our cast-off
floral skirts, yard sale pillowcases from the ’40s, fill them
with lavender and millet to stretch it, eating whatever is ripe
at the time — maybe figs and pears — wondering when the first
rains are due, one of us wearing her beautiful Chinese blouse.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her book of linked historical poems, Walking Wheel, will be out in early 2026 from Red Hen Press.