Recipe: Snowplow

By B. Tyler Lee

Issue 43 • Spring 2021 • Poetry

8 oz hot chocolate, prepared
1 oz Bailey’s Irish Cream
1 oz Malibu coconut rum
½ oz Crème de Cacao
Whipped cream
Cinnamon

Begin low: Pow—right in the warm place within me. Powdered sugar, sweet even when I growl cold.
The only good plow starts with a request, a bow that says, Turn me over; make me new. I’ve never told you otherwise: Yes, I asked this of him. Yes, he and I both wanted him to, and he did.
I could douse you in a kind of tropic-drowsing: I picture you in coconut-shell bikini, opening cacao seeds in your hands, overflowing at a touch.
But come, let’s be more honest: With you a half-country away, my ground’s frozen, unplowable. I thaw only at the tips of your fingers—towel-clean, pleasure-cowed. Grown low.
Lead with whiskey; close with cream.
He and I, we whipped frenzy together, sprinkled it across our days like I’d never go fallow. As if we’d never eat a ploughman’s lunch and call it nouvelle cuisine, we’d open our days and blow.
Cold nights, I beg you to come sooner; plowed again, rum rattling across the line. But in my shame, I know the truth: All I want is my body to remain a field, soft animals prowling, year after year—moonfall, snowrise.

B. Tyler Lee

Tyler Lee is the author of one poetry collection, With Our Lungs in Our Hands (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016), and her essay “A large volume of small nonsenses” won the 2020 Talking Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Qwerty Literary Journal, Acting Up: Queer in the New Century (Jacar Press), and elsewhere. She teaches in the Midwest.

Kate Birch

Kate Jarvik Birch is a full time visual artist, author, playwright, and daydreamer. Her art has been featured worldwide in stores like Target, Pier One and World Market, as well as in television series and major motion pictures such as, Transparent, Medium, Glee, Twenty-One Jump Street and Looper. Her essays and short stories have been published in literary journals including Indiana Review and Saint Ann’s Review. She is also the author of the YA novels PERFECTED, TARNISHED, UNRAVELED and DELIVER ME. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.