Notes from the Dishwasher Café

Notes from the Dishwasher Café

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Notes from the Dishwasher Café
Notes from the Dishwasher Café
BATHWATER BABY

BATHWATER BABY

Caroline Manring's avatar
Caroline Manring
Nov 29, 2023
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Notes from the Dishwasher Café
Notes from the Dishwasher Café
BATHWATER BABY
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My scrapping hand is a little too itchy. For a poet, this can be an asset: when one of my poet friends, into whose care I cry and vomit and bleed my “darlings,” suggests that I delete the final two words of a poem that I thought *hinged* on those lil hotcakes, I become absurdly excited. I slobber. I do.

I get so short-circuited by the sudden recognition and exhilaration I feel as I approach the chopping block—as whatever neurotransmitters I have left begin leaping into a sort of moth-eaten but super-committed little conga line—that I’ve actually thrown out casseroles WITH the dish.

In a poem, and sometimes in the kitchen, the maniacal glee of scrapping things is often worth the maimed pages and scorched counters it leaves behind, if only because it allows us to give an adamant finger to what isn’t working. I poke up like a whack-a-mole from under the stinking rubble of what I’ve been hanging onto for vestigial reasons, dingleberry reasons, other people’s ass-hat reasons— polluting, diluting motivations that run counter to what my heart knows to be true—and let my freakish little rodent teeth glint in the sun as I squeal out some version of YOU CANT KILL ME.

However.

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