To Teach a Man to Cook

After Patricia Smith

By Devonaire Ortiz

My grandmother did not want my wife to curse me
like she did her patrilineage each time she made rice in the caldero.
No hexes, no dark cloud forming in response to where’s my dinner?
Her first grandson would feed the family. Pork shoulder passed through time
with a Puerto Rican DeLorean. Not Marty but Martí.
She taught me picadillo first ‘cause it was easy. Beef and a lil
onion and a lil olive and some tomato sauce and then the rest of it.
Así, let it brown. She never planned to do anything but cook for me
as a thank you for being alive, but I was to keep the food
even when she left. My friends would love me for my sancocho
and the girls would, too. Not one for witchcraft but my sazón would
cast a spell. Call the hood back from the fire hydrant at 7 o clock,
keep meat on her great grandkids’ bones, give their mother the day off.
Her neck would not hurt and no one would resent her boy.
There would only be reasons to love me.

Grandpa went to Vietnam. Each of his sons was to soldier.
To make a war where there wasn’t. When he put down
the machine gun he weaponized his tongue and let acid rain.
Because he burned jungles to be here. He brought me Hot Wheels
whenever he visited long after they divorced so that I would thirst
for the constant explosion of eight eager cylinders.
He wanted to help raise a macho with bravado-scented arm hair
to call to the mamis from the Corvette he kept himself with the oil streaks
to prove it. A provider who gave nothing else up. The day I turned seventeen
I deserved my Heineken and a hot plate from my woman when I got home.

Grandpa asked me if I had a girlfriend every time and grandma said
Ay, Claudio with sucked teeth. Leave him alone. And they both laughed
at a good thing to bicker about. He wanted me jolly. Big belly and bass.
A bandana. A little-bit-drunk smile. They had different ways of getting there.
I was to turn the stones they gave me in my hands until they smoothed. Now
I’m soft and I love men and fast cars and to sweat over my own meals.
That works for them.

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Devonaire Ortiz is a Puerto Rican-American poet from the Bronx. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY.