and Wild Rice casserole, the recipe on my mother’s notepaper
now framed, leans on the kitchen counter, casual
and ever-present. As a newlywed, I’d call to ask who stocked
that hard-to-find black grain growing in lakes near Bemidji
where we fished, wind-ruffled waves backhanding
our aluminum hull, what to keep, vacation-simple.
My mother told me I was difficult when young, always
testing limits, the unwritten ones. What I learned,
I learned through caress and discipline. In the recipe,
soak rice in scalding water 30 minutes, drain;
mix with ground beef and onions, soup, mushrooms,
seven spices—the footprint of ditto marks under each
½ teaspoon marching down the page, mother’s mix of print
and longhand flowing as if the recipe wrote itself below
her name engraved in bold on top, though she forgot
to leave space for temperature and baking time; those
she boxed opposite the spices at the bottom, like
after-thoughts—mine crowd with what’s left:
what we never said, what we can’t take back.
–
Jane C. Miller is the author of Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and coauthor of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019). Her poetry has appeared in RHINO, Colorado Review, UCity Review, and Bear Review, among others. She coedits the online poetry journal ൪uartet.