Comfort Food by Sydney Sheltz-Kempf

Comfort Food | Sydney Sheltz-Kempf

Could a depressed person make homemade ravioli? Ha.
The joke’s on you, C-SSRS. 
My hand-me-down bread machine is an Oster, 
and the manual contains an eggless recipe for pasta dough 
so there’s nothing manual about it. 
My hands are free
to collect all the tears I shed while
shredding the parmesan,
and I have enough salted water
to boil the entire batch. 
My arms and legs are the right gangly proportion to flail
like a yellow perch out of water, 
but he won’t let me sit in my bathtub alone anymore
because he knows I’ve chosen the scent of my soap 
based on how it tastes in my lungs: 
vanilla with a hint of sotolon. 
Sometimes when I just can’t do anything else, 
I sit on the linoleum floor
in the tiny apartment galley kitchen, 
lean my head against the flimsy plastic of the dishwasher door
and let the tears run down my face until the tissues in my hand become a sponge bath.
It’s a trick I learned from my mother
when she answered the cord phone on the wall 
and learned her baby brother died. 
She was so dehydrated when she pulled herself off the floor
that she never cried again – a salted fish of grief.
I just want to be like my mom. I ask her: 
“Did you have a bread machine?” “Yes.” 
“Was it before or after you cried?” “I can’t remember.” 
It is not the first time
she has not given me the answers I need.
If I’m depressed enough, I’ll make the damn waffles too
(thank you Oster manual) 
and let the maple syrup run in rivulets instead, 
pooling stagnant like all the memories
forgotten in the dopamine drought.  
Carbohydrates are comfort food
only because they stick in your gut 
and hold you together from the inside out, 
crammed in the crevices 
where the things that eat away at you used to lie. 
I need to shower,
and my husband is expecting a semblance of dinner, 
but I only have enough caloric energy
for one horrifically large task: 
living.

About the Author:

Sydney Sheltz-Kempf began writing poetry to cope with the stress of her PhD in Developmental Neurobiology. Her previous work can be found in Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, Sonder Midwest, Hilltop Review, Atlas + Alice, Evocations Review, Dying Dahlia Review, and elsewhere. Her previous chapbooks include “Adding Up Forever: A Memoir” (2018), “Kissing the Face of the Grandfather Clock” (2023), and “An Experiment Gone Wrong” (2023).