Anger #1 Michael Levan

Home and alone, he makes a mess / of rigatoni with meat sauce. He browns the ground beef, dumps a jar of sauce, tosses in several teaspoons of red chili flakes / to arrabiata his first homemade meal in weeks as the noodles boil. / A simple pleasure he’s missed, cooking takes him / away; he needn’t think of the two seminar papers, the poetry portfolio, twenty-one research essays to grade / and add to the other calculations he’s fallen / behind on due in a few days now. This is not complicated, / mixing store-bought ingredients with some extras to doctor it / to his liking. He can let everything else fade / until it turns into echo wind whispers away. /

He thinks about when they were dating, / her apartment on Stuart with the kitchen bay window, / its glass so sun-comprehending even he, the night owl, didn’t mind / sitting at the table, all that sun pouring over him, / as he watched her slice and toast, bake and parboil, roast and simmer. / He remembers her talking about her two trips to Italy, / and how before the first, she took an Italian class with her father / whose tongue never quite wrapped around the language / so he ordered their meals louder: / stracciatella, bucatini coi funghi, caponata, names buoyant enough to carry a man and his daughter / into memories they’ve shared for years. / How on the trip with her aunt, their luggage was lost, they were robbed three times, / and the skirt she bought was so short on her American frame / she wasn’t let into Saint Peter’s. He remembers her / telling him her favorite word— arrabiata— / and asking if he knows what it means. Angry, she says. / The dish is so spicy from the peppers, they say it’s angry. /

He eats, and the heat settles on his tongue, / then it comes from everywhere inside him: pharmacy lines / and no sleep, his favorite boy names removed from the list, / the phone call to his mother. / He washes the pasta bowl, brushing hardened sauce / down the drain. He feels / his body tingle and shake, he wants the world / to fuck off for everything it’s taken from him. / For keeping joy and excitement from his reach. / He can’t begin to fake either, carried as he’s been these last few weeks by nothing / that resembles wonder.