The Joy of Cooking (in your pants)

"Best with horseradish / and economical -- it will probably grow back" ("The Joy of Cooking," 5-6).

There was a speck on my computer screen to the right of that closing parenthesis, and I thought it was a period, so I kept clicking to the right of the speck but my cursor would never get to the other side of it! Man. Poetry is hard.

This poem is definitely metaphorical, but I also think it's amusing -- I laughed a little bit about the quote I quoted. We'll get to that a little bit more later. What's happening in this poem, though, is that the speaker is judging her sister's talkativity (don't tell me that's not a word) and her brother's heartlessness.

Her sister's tongue has a lot of parts to it -- the skin, roots, and bones -- and it will probably "grow back." That suggests to me that she talks too much and is unyielding in whatever she says. Her brother's heart is firm, dry, and not interesting, and it barely feeds two people. I can interpret that as a brother who is kind of callous and boring, and he has little love to offer.

I haven't gone through the funniest poem titles for "in your pants" yet, so I'll do that now:

• "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" in your pants
• "The Convergence of the Twain" in your pants
• "I taste a liquor never brewed" in your pants
• "The Joy of Cooking" in your pants