New guests, old late. It’s so deeply winter, so lately winter, and yet latening still, it might as well be spring, let’s agree. They’re waiting out in that freezing sheet of fall, sheets, fitted sleet and flattening hail, them the great Huddled, shivering sleepless in a week’s worth of tattered up against the fattily marbled frontsteps: some lean, others squat, leansquat fall lie amid the puddles of stock the weather’s inflicted, infected, cloudorgans, nimbusglands…their kinder, so wellbehaved, even courteous, all would you be so kind as tos and thankyous, can you please pass and I appreciate it in the past they’re fighting again, incorrigible gangs of meat kinder vs. milk kinder they’re rolling a tumble in tantrums of sauce, spatterings, tussle’s splatter, angryred, rage-gravy, sickly slick mixings unstrained, unholy dressings and impure preparations, small heads going uncapped gone uncorked in the chaos, brandnamed I forget, or whether generic, their spilled paste on the sidewalk, a waste, and them, too: they’ve been waiting, waiting, too long they’ve been waiting forever — their salttears, their breadcrumb whining, their pounding on and knockerkneading of doors that open to be only fudged shadows, toffeemocha delight, with their fists raw, their fingernails scratched down to sliced through if not merely nicked flesh upon panes of air whipped up in whirrs of sky’s mixer, air’s whisk…it’s a superflumina out there, and appetizingly enormous, they’re pushing and shoving, forking to knife, tumultuous; all having begun politely enough last Shabbos this’ll end, if ever, if any of them remember to set their timers, which are their tickytock hearts, in limbs pulled from sockets, noodlestretched, dismembered strewn in shallow stinging pools of lemonjuice and lime, citric stagnant at gratings clogged, a flow sewerseeking, the lowest ground amidst such layercaked, panbrowned waste, these remnants sprinkled atop heaps of stems, these spit pits, and seeds, the compost cholent, the sewage let sit. The hot spice of dessert tea scented with excrement, sugary urine. Ones nearest the door, the door the front one scratchedup, tore at desperately, its window fogged to strudelthin dough, were an eternity last week ago trampled to death, then buried under stuffings of humus, heaped far off at the edge of the lawn, at the neighbors’ fence of snakes, posts from whose mouths hang singleservings of signs, the spleening of liver…Keep Out. Private prop. Violators will be, and will always. Out that far at half-&-half, the halved again flow of laneless road — entire families dock at sidewalk to disembark meaty junks, pareved barges they’re hollowedout, scooped from steerage from huge ships of melon unripe and sweet, destined, themselves, for here’s lost Friday, this last Sabbath of Shabbos, all with their own recipes, all of their own recipes, their own ways of doing things by which everything and everyone else is heretically wrong — waiting to prepare, for only the preparation of waiting. Time. They approach, drag themselves dribbling froth along the marzipanly edged path of lawn laid with macaroon slates they arrive at the stoop, step as ingredients supererogatory if inedible, too, to the door. And then the porchlight, a bulbed berry, flicks on in its drupes, and they turn their plated faces Heavenward, awed.
Their appetite’s for in, though — a taste for in only.
A bundled bunch of menschs tight in their suits as if kishka, stuffed derma, threepiece intestinal, they drip the gravying fobs from their cavities, stir the clocks.
Mothers, washing faces of suet and grease, sit sucking the schnapps out of the ears of their kinder.
One innocent son aged much over the interminable last week, stands. Moon laid the egg hatched to darkness, the black of a starless burn.
Then, lightning flashes flank’s vein, illuminates the house: the standing invitation threefloored, forever ripening, its siding all peel and rind stuck together as if with the mortar of honey, too sweet…
