Gravy Boat

Andrea Cohen

I’ve got one foot

in the gravy, one

in the gravy boat.

It’s the same foot.

The other one?

I cut it off.

Otherwise it would

have stood its one

foot in the grave.

I balance easily now

in the gravy boat

on my good foot.

I got the boat cheap,

when Bolivia lost its coast

and auctioned off its navy.

Where am I sailing?

Who can say?

Goodbye Bolivia, hello gravy!

Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collection is Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry). She directs The Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

“The first front porch that mattered to me was on a cobblestone street in Iowa City, where I lived with three fabulous writers, women who favored beautiful, clackety, manual typewriters—Underwoods and Royals and Remingtons—and who typed all seasons on that porch. The front porch across the street was always empty, the shades on its wide windows always drawn. More than a few poems and stories imagined what might have been happening behind those shades.

Where I live now has a traditional sort of Victorian front porch, which I love, though mostly I sit on the porch steps. It’s a sort of in-between place, and sitting there gives me a fighting chance of intercepting our hounds, Daisy and Beckett, who like to lounge on the porch proper until their favorite prey—a passing tabby or thundering UPS truck—causes them to bolt, baying, toward the street.”