What the tv chefs don’t teach us | Don Mihsill

At day-break, I saw a man re-assemble
an old Yezdi. I drew the curtains, opened
a window, rubbed the bars free from a week’s dust &
tasted the night congealed in my mouth.

The landlady knocks on the door,
Alice is already in the shower &
mother calls to remind me to bring her
home at Christmas. This is familiar:

Alice walks-in, wrapped up in a daisy
print towel. It is not what it looks like.
She’s a chef and she has taught me
to do the basics right: plan in advance,

use a sharp knife and when in doubt
trust the selected ingredients. Above all,
she says, do not deconstruct a dish
if you already love what you have or
if you don’t know how to
honor the individual
parts like the whole.

Don is from where the clouds live. He wiled away his younger years sleeping on the grassy fields of Patkai, Nagaland. In Shillong, his English teacher ignited a love for poetry. Naturally, he was going to grow up and become a lawyer. Currently, he is busy figuring a way to let poetry pay the bills (of the mind and the heart).