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Hello poets! Today we draw inspiration from food, infusing our favorite recipes with poetry or employing the language of food preparation to uncommon uses in poems about less tangible things. Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt.

Recipe poem. Turn a real (or real-ish) recipe into a poem by employing poetic devices like imagery (metaphor, simile), repetition, assonance, or alliteration. Really transform your recipe. Don’t worry about specific measurements. You want to capture the essence of what is being created. Check out Bill Holm’s “Bread Soup.”

Or, write a poem about something completely different in the style of a recipe. A recipe for disaster? Love? Happiness? Loneliness? How about a recipe for a new beginning (see Jane Hirshfield’s “De Capo”)? What about a recipe for a color (see Arthur Sze’s “Ten Thousand to One”)? What are the ingredients? How must they be prepared? Peruse old cookbooks and see what comes to mind.

Here’s my poem, from a recipe I make each year. I think I was inspired by yesterday’s out-of-season snow.

Christmas Cookies

Combine equal parts margarine and cream cheese in a bowl.
“Cut” with a fork until the white and yellow swirls are perfectly combined,
pale yellow like the ghost of a daffodil corona.
Add flour, a little shake at a time.
Your arm will grow weary.
You will believe you have made a mistake.
Granules will whisper and slink
against the sides of your bowl and pile into little dunes.
Sink your fingers and clutch fistfuls.
Close your eyes.
Marry the particles to one another through force of will.
Form two large balls of dough,
cover with cling wrap, and chill.

Pour a white river of granulated sugar.
Watch it cascade in little sparkling falls from the counter.
Pinch dough and roll it between your palms.
Invoke the alchemy of body heat to raise it from the dead.
Dredge each ball in the river of snow.
Stack them, an arsenal of twinkling cannonballs,
a dozen snowmen, awaiting assembly.

Bring out Grandma’s old, red-handled rolling pin,
smooth wood cured by butter, cured by lard,
sealed with the kiss of a thousand floured surfaces,
color of sunlit honey, old saddle leather, fresh-dipped caramel apples.
Roll the balls of dough into discs.
Launch dozens of little flying carpets on the river of sugar.

Open a can of Solo almond pie filling.
Hear the delicious suck as the lid sticks; prise it open.
Behold the glistening cylinder of amber,
trapping in time the secret dreams of almond trees.
Hear their leaves rustling in the breeze.
Spread it sparingly on the little flying carpets,
distributing the flecks of almond like panhandlers’ gold.
Roll the ovals width-wise, into little sleeping bags for elves,
ready to be slung over tiny shoulders.
Dredge once more in sugar and tuck the little bundles,
close but not touching, on a parchment-lined sheet.

Bake until done.
Trust no timer, you must use your eyes.
Check often for signs of progress. They will not rise.
They must not change color. But, by some magic
in the hot almond-scented air,
you will know when it is time.

Remove the attractive ones immediately
to your best serving dish, or, if traveling,
to the tin with the red cardinal perched in the snow.
Behold your little tight-wrapped sleeping babes,
hummocks of Christmas snow, washed gold
by the light of a candlelit window.

Dispose of the castoffs. Those broken and imploded,
oozing fast-hardening blobs of burnt amber,
those that have become browned, on their edges or their tops.
These are best dispatched with a mug of steaming tea,
in the glow of the Christmas tree,
everyone gone to bed.

Did Day 3 convince you that random words are your friends? Today’s (optional) poetry prompt is another simple way to harvest words for your poetry.

Borrowed Word Challenge: Grab the closest book, go to page 29, and write down ten words. Use seven of them in a poem. Extra credit if you use four of them at the end of a line. Thank you again to Kelli Russell Agodon for this and other fun prompts for National Poetry Writing Month.

Here are my words and what I wrote with them. I tried to be keep this poem pretty lean, using the found words and little else. The book I grabbed was my current obsession, a falling apart 1895 copy of The Cottage Physician that I inherited from my grandmother. Page 29 describes the structure of the human heart.

ventricles, flattened, inclosed, moist, membranous, sack, smooth, cavity, valves, heart-case

unrequited love

valve me into
your heart-case
moist cavity of a
membranous sack
ventricled memories
pumping me flat
pumping me smooth
you will hardly know
that I am there

Friday the Thirteenth. The perfect day to write about a superstition—real or imagined, yours or someone else’s—and how to ward it off. Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt.

Superstition. Here’s another from the archives of the Poets&Writers weekly poetry prompts, this one from October 17, 2017. “Write a poem that begins with the presentation of a mysterious or inexplicable anxiety. Then in the latter half of the poem, present a ritual to reverse the effects … a physical ritual, lucky objects, or incantation.” Shorter may work better here. See what Amy Lowell does in her poem “Superstition.” Or consider making your poem a magic spell or a recitation of ingredients for a potion or concoction (think of the witches in Macbeth tossing ingredients into their cauldron).

Here’s my poem:

“Hi Grandma”

the rag that
twice daily
slips from the
dishwasher handle
has nothing
to do with my
grandmother
who died
in a bed
almost three
hundred miles
from here

but what can it
hurt she’d be
so disappointed
if I didn’t at
least say hello