Gabrielle Myers, 2/3/2014

Current Occupation: English Composition Instructor
Former Occupation: Chef
Contact Information: For over to twelve years, Gabrielle has worked as a chef for San Francisco Bay area restaurants and catering companies. She currently teaches English Composition classes at St. Mary's College of California and Diablo Valley College. Her recent publications include poems in Nebo, San Francisco Public Press, Damselfly Press, The Solitary Plover, Caesura, Art for Autism, The Evergreen Review, and 14 Hills. In 2011, she published a critical essay on Virginia Woolf and the trench poets of World War I in the journal English, a division of Oxford University Press.

Prom Night

and the kids from Palo Alto arrive in black Hummer limos.

Shed your dirty layer, wrinkled carrot!

Along the line, transparent orange peels and potato skins

get mashed onto mats by Florencio’s black boots.

Stiff walk. He’s bent down to pull

hotel and sauté pans for forty years,

now his back refuses to bow for stainless steel.

        Salmon, lose that funky scale suit!

        Slide, slide along my blade. The white cutting board

        suits you, makes your pink flesh perk up in bleaching kitchen light.

        Now you cost 16.99 a #, and every cut I make carefully watched.

        Repeat after me, Fish: “I will contribute to the plate.

        I will be opalescent in my center.

        I will reveal the profundity of ocean river migration.”

        Onions sweat in your juice, release into butter.

        Brown soft: caramelize sweet.

Nic scurries behind me to gather sauté pans

caked with chanterelle beef sauce.

Ben slices each Flame grape into thirds:

Two hundred grapes in less than an hour.

Jelly slices spread flat in hotel pans.

Soon we will make 140 grape, goat cheese,

and candied walnut mixed green salads.