Lauren Delapenha
Apologia
As a new year’s resolution, I want
to learn to use a pressure cooker
so that I may give the people
I injure in the coming year something
useful: beef stew, not cake. I want
to learn how not to leave
the room, to tolerate the certainty
of blowing up if not for the revolving
valve whose seething, I am told, is a sign
of safety. Being that I still cannot abide
the thought of drawing a knife
across the neck of any animal,
to hold in my hands the undesirable
cuts—the tongue, the tail, the tough
evidence of having been born
to work, to be worked, seems
a small but necessary step
towards becoming more honest
of a carnivore. Listen. I have seen
Le Sang des Bêtes; I have seen
the upturned chair legs of New York
cafés after closing and considered
the flailing, the flaying, the strapping
arms required of all
butchery. My injured
will no doubt note and appreciate
this gesture towards the cinematic.
I will show up, sweating and unannounced,
with the pot, the bottom of it good
and burnt. We will sit and sweat
in the black and white noon.
And we will eat. At the knife’s
slightest request, the meat will slip
from the bone and gleam.
Lauren Delapenha reads “Apologia”
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination.