Wooden cabinets, slamming, banging
with impacts some consider disturbing or dramatic,
what we have learned to be the sounds of the kitchen.

The kitchen, in which my mother cooks
once, twice a week at most,
where dishes clank and shake
with every forceful shut of those cabinets that hold them.
She does it so we know
that she is even more of a woman of the house
than she already is.

Keep slamming them,
it helps us discover a mood.
One smash, she is tired and has just woken up
to fulfill a duty she’d rather ignore.
Two or three bangs, her boyfriend of the week
has said something to offend her.
Five or six bludgeoning slams of the wood
means pretending to be a mother
must be so tough.
Keep slamming them,

as hard as she wants to.
Make sure the wood chips and splinters off,
just to leave it unrepaired for months.
Then, discover that we have been cheated
out of our security deposit,
call us stupid for it,
and then slam them some more.

Let the cabinets ricochet shut.
Bouncing once, loudly on impact,
followed again, more subtle this time,
with a softer blow before closing completely.
We wonder if she realizes
that no matter how hard, how aggressively
she shuts them, the cabinets will never
be any fuller with food from her empty paycheck.

Repainting them is out of the question,
there is not much a fresh coat of white
can do to a cabinet
with edges so chipped,
it no longer resembles a rectangle,
or really any closed polygon for that matter.

Some days, we wonder if this is how every kitchen sounds,
where melodrama develops into tunes
of batter, both the slamming
and the occasional mix of a birthday cake.
Most times, though, we understand
that the sounds of the kitchen
should not make us want to hide.