Melrude and Mud Cookies

I sit in a pub in Melrude with two friends
enjoying the warmth melting my iced
Jeans, wet now, I shiver watching Buster shake
off the snow we just missed on the unnamed
lake with northern pike perfect for pickling,
canning jars, water, salt, vinegar, onion, garlic.

The pizza comes, not Vi’s, or even Dominos
but it tastes like lobster and porterhouse, cheap
beer substituting vintage vino – Bordeaux maybe.
might this be what a spoonful of rice taste like
in Darfour, or Haitian mud cookies— water,
mud, and vegetable oil mixed then baked on rooftops?

Four thaw in the kitchen sink stinking through
the cinnamon and cloves simmering on the stovetop
with their shard jaws smiling at an inside joke they
whisper secretly to one another about the stainless
glaive I hold-- ready to separate flesh from the souls
to soak in salt and water, white vinegar added just for fun.

Not like the souls looking for orange roughy heads
discarded down stainless chutes reflecting Sugarloaf between
the wings of seagulls, beyond the turning terns. Rounded
faces hungry for fish head soup that most of us
would not think of boiling in our kitchens creating
finned stench, stovetop simmering— Grandma’s lutefisk.

Starving Haitian grey tongues begging for better.