The Recipe.
Hummingbird Featured Poem. The Recipe.
By Ada Limón
The Recipe
In the middle of your worn maroon scrapbook
where you kept the recipes you cut or ripped
out of Bon Appétit and Saveur and some
other slick mags I didn’t recognize, where I was
desperately looking for your simple coleslaw recipe,
panicked and over-tired, pulled apart and splayed
on the hard slab of life, in the middle of your
scrapbook, I find the note from Swedish Hospital
and the instructions on how to increase
your iron levels. I remember how we’d make you
eat beet greens, and that time, anxious and older
than we should have been, my youngest brother
and I ordered steaks from the fanciest restaurant
we knew and together ate them with you in your
hospital room. We took photos and grim-smiled
because it was proof, proof of our love, proof
that after all of our work of fine food and provisions,
of lists and recipes, you would get better. That was
the agreement. We follow everything to the letter,
you do what is called for, and you live. I can’t find
the recipe anymore, thrown away or never there
to begin with, all this to say, the scrim is thin today,
I miss you, I managed to make coleslaw, though I
had to make it up, all on my own.
Editor’s Note: This poem is a poignant depiction of life. Much emotion is packed into these lines, which together span the lifetime of a relationship. The writing is real and the concept(s) are presented so simply. It’s beautiful.
The Recipe was initially published in Ada Limón’s 2015 poetry collection, Bright Dead Things, and subsequently in various publications. Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over the years, Limón’s poetry has been published in publications including, but not limited to, the New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street.
In July of 2022, Ada Limón became the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States.