Hot Love

HOT LOVE
by Carol Sawyer


All my love poured
into those meals: exotic
flavors, painstakingly
learned in alien marketplaces
and alien tongues:
Quechua, Aymara, Urdu.
Piles of unfamiliar powders:
achiote and haldi, blood-
red and yellow, sizzled under
the striped awnings in heat
and cracking cold.

All my love, energy,
time: bent ardently over my
charcoal fires, my hearth
of twigs or clay,
to feed you every succulent
sacrifice, the taste
of each new world: eaten
with sighs, every finger licked
clean: Can you still taste
my love?


We'moon '02 Calendar, published by Mother Tongue Ink, week of June 24, 2002.