My name is Poetumma and a number of months ago I was staying with a friend Ellen Bass, the poet, and over a cup of tea, she told me that she and her wife Jammit had been memorizing poems together during code and then they broke into this particular poem and my memory is being in their kitchen me with a cup of tea, one of them sitting, and they knew the

lines by heart and when one would stop, the other one would pick up, saying the lines together

at the same time sometimes, and they were grinning beaming glowing with the

deliciousness of the words of this beautiful poem so here it is refrigerator

1957 by Thomas Locks.

More like a vault, you pull the handle out and on the shelves not a lot.

And what there is, a boiled potato in a bag, a chicken carcass under a looking dispirited, drained, mugged. This is not a place to go in hope or hunger.

But just to the right of the middle of the middle door shelf, on fire, a

lit from within red, heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red in their liquid,

exotic, aloof, slumming in such company a jar of maraschino cherries

three quarters full fiery globes like strippers at a church social.

Marishino cherries.

Marishino, the only foreign word I knew.

Not once did I see these cherries employed. Not in a drink, nor on top of a glob of ice cream, or just pop one in your mouth, not once. The same jar there through an entire childhood of dull dinners, bald meat, pockeded peas, and see above boiled potatoes.

Maybe they came over from the old country, family heirlooms, or were status symbols bought with a piece of the first paycheck from a sweatshop

which beat the pig farm in Bohemia handed down from my grandparents to my parents to be someday mine than my

child's. They were beautiful and if I never ate one it was because I knew it might be missed, or because I knew it would not be replaced,

and because you do not eat that which rips your heart with joy. So much about what I love about the poem is the memory of when I heard

Alan and Janet say it over each other. They were beaming with love for each other

as well as love for the language of the poem.

But what I recalled immediately having heard it was the sensual nature of the poem, you know, this

fairly drab refrigerator and in the middle of the refrigerator,

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