Anna Conquest



Dirty Dishes, 2021 

All over America women are burning dinners. It’s lamb chops in Peoria: it’s haddock

in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago:

tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas.

All over America women are burning food they’re supposed to bring with calico smile on

platters glittering like wax.

Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat.

Carbonised despair presses like a clinker

from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.

If she wants to grill anything, it’s

her husband spitted over a slow fire.

If she wants to serve him anything it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the

heart of an insomniac.

Her life is cooked and digested,

nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.

Look, she says, once I was roast duck

on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

What’s That Smell in the Kitchen? Marge Piercy 1976

@annaconquestphotography