i’ve actually been doing a lot of cooking lately, it’s really therapeutic
By Leah Duarte
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one teaspoon of paprika doesn’t seem like enough google says vegetables aren’t carcinogenic when burned the way meat is but i should throw these out just in case did you know one in twenty-five packages of chicken contains salmonella roasting vegetables with lemon zest adds this gorgeous fragrant quality i really didn’t expect, you should try it, even a little bit really elevates it flour can also be contaminated with salmonella heat treat it first you can eat rolled oats though they’re steamed before they’re packaged the bacteria can’t survive the process is it too early to turn the oven on i don’t want to waste energy honey apple cider vinegar paprika olive oil dijon mustard, best salad dressing you’ll ever have in a years-old post the vegetarian recipe blogger who’s been holding my hand admits to having a difficult time lately i try to find a more recent entry but they’re organized alphabetically and by recipe type not by date i want to know if she’s okay she has a dog i hope the dog is okay is all soap non-toxic? if i eat with my fingers directly after washing my hands is it maybe i should wash again with that hypoallergenic bar don’t think about it i just really enjoy the act of creating something from nothing can i just substitute water oat milk is too expensive to drop two cups on this this pan is scratched is it going to leave chemical residue in the food don’t think about it cooking is such a different animal to baking and i do mean animal wrestle with living things imperfect bumps and asymmetry cut them down to roughly the same size so they cook at the same time i never cut them down to the same size they fight my knife sometimes the sweet potato is a little raw but it’s not harmful to eat raw potatoes are harmful to eat raw and they don’t count towards your five a day anyway every time i slice a sweet potato i remember my best friend slamming her knife into one to make baked fries the whole potato came up off the cutting board stuck to the blade and she slammed it down again like an axe split it right in two we don’t talk as much now i miss her sharp elbows against my neck when we’d curl up together every time i slice a sweet potato i remember how scared i was she was going to hurt herself she has a cat now one of those furless ones i forgot to turn the oven on
at the end of my fifteen-minute trial session the therapist calls me resilientBy Leah Duarte
her first week in med school a friend of mine tells me about junk DNA
illegible scrawls on the genome with no adaptive advantage no understood purpose except extreme chaos within ostensible order what she means is, isn't it insane that it works somehow? what i mean is, the body is dissonance the body is screaming at the molecular level, a constant and sustained state of emergency directionless fury at its own disparate parts. what i mean is, the body knows how to work around white noise what i mean is, every time i’m certain body cannot stay in motion go through the motions body does body does not acknowledge that most disparate part body hears the screaming and body just keeps going what i mean is, this is not the strength you think it is what i mean is, no Leah Duarte is a writer and graduate of the University of Toronto’s MA in English program. She has worked in research on diasporic language acquisition, 18th century poetry, and AI learning in the digital humanities sphere. Her thematic interests are shaped by her formative experiences with diaspora and the violence of grappling with female identity. Most recently her work has appeared in The Soap Box Volume II: “Home” anthology. Find her on Twitter @llduart_.
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