By Ellen Kartchner Gregory

Now that the unwanted sauce has tainted your pasta,
let's follow that flaw further: the air you breathe? --
the kitchen's adrift in fumes of tomato, onion, garlic,
drenched in rosemary, oregano, basil, bay, thyme...

And when you kiss me goodnight,
& smell my breath rank with the tang of asiago,
my long cheek may seem the indifferent difficulty of life,
O my sad child.