[Prompt: Write a poem about a haunting, real or imagined, detailed or abstract]

 

Haunted by Foods Passed

Who could forget loaves of bread stuffed with chocolate-covered cherries, perfect for making French toast on slow Saturday mornings?  That bakery on 4^th or 9^th street (I always mixed them up) in Vancouver long defunct.

Copenhagen pastries hard with solid butter, perfectly formed by that Dane now retired.  Even the waxed paper they clung to indelibly haunts me.

Real Greek pizza, dough formed at six each morning by Marguerite—long passed—who spoke no English.  Her coarse gray braid and gnarled hands both reminded me of olive trees in black-and-white photos.  Village Pizza today: a bland facsimile.

Chocolate marshmallows that puffed and smoked on sticks over beach fires; slip off the crispy shell and toast the molten middle again.  What corporation would discontinue such a thing?

Big yellow papaya from Hawaii, sliced down the middle and emptied of black glistening seeds.  I filled the hollow with large-curd cottage cheese so many mornings, until the markets stopped getting you and we’ve got these wizened, unripe, expensive failures now!

Montréal: you are famous for smoked meat but your sesame bagels I will never get over.  Hand formed, poached in honey water, baked in a woodfire oven.  You still exist, but I can never afford to visit you again.  Ditto New York cream cheese with seasonings and diced vegetables.

Fresh chinook salmon, you are my favorite food ever.  I would stand at the fish counter and make sure I got the line-caught Sitka king with the most belly fat.  I bought you for my father’s last great meal.  But now I feel like I’m taking you directly out of the mouth of a starving orca whale.

Something in a Chinese restaurant in Durham, New Hampshire, I called “orgasm chicken.”  You were coated in sesame seeds and I could still cry from missing you after I graduated and moved.

Chicken in an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, England: you were marinated in yogurt and I’ve tried to order you in every Indian restaurant since.  I have failed to find you.

Sara Lee pecan coffee cake before trans fat was banned.  You and Lorna Doone cookies were superb.  RIP.

White cheese with smoked pork right inside, bought at a roadside stand in Vermont in the 80s and never to be found on the internet.

Orange-chocolate ice cream in California.  Soft serve rolled in chocolate powder in Denmark.

Ontario butter tarts.

Patak’s Kabouli sauce.

Fresh Elk liver and onions.

Grandma’s canned green beans.

Hob Nobs.

Apple beer.

Jello 1-2-3.