Pizza for the Queen
I walk into
The kitchen
At my school
Where they are
Preparing the pizza
And shout
Pizza for the queen
It’s 7 in the morning
And the head chef
Yolle says
That’s all that matters
And with my head
In the ice maker
Cooling off from
The morning rampage
In my house
The two girls screaming
Out of their loneliness
The wife screaming
Out of her motherly horror
I think no
It’s kindness
And love
That matters
My face in the freeze
And why I should
Have been more compassionate
When I slammed the front door
Sick and tired
Of the polka dotted howitzers
And Lego semi-automatics
That tear up the neighborhood
The back of my psyche
The mailman’s mailbag
You don’t want people
To stay away
You want people
To come close
To get inside
The ice machine
With you
So when you rise
From the cold
Your faces all filled
With Antarctica
With polar bear
And glacier
You can get
Really close
So close you are not
Touching
But touching
And slowly warm
One another
Bring the pink back
The heat
Thaw together
Like nothing in life
Ever mattered
As much
One Big Perpetual Slingshot of Suck
When you wrench
Me into the cavern
Of being soft
I have my apron on
The onions are half-mast
Not translucent enough
The peppers
Have not been halved
While you are
Half a world away
Upstairs
In your rocking chair
Of Talmud and grace
Though grace is a hard thing
To pinpoint
But we try anyway
Amidst the You suck
You suck
I suck
The whole world
One big
Perpetual slingshot
Of suck
It’s a given right
That we try anyway
Me in my apron
With the ground beef
About to be braised
You upstairs in your black chair
Of borscht and simmer
An oven of rosemary potatoes
On high heat
A library of your books
Safe inside the world
This is what the world does
To me in the kitchen
Puts me inside
This cavern of soft
The sound of your
Chair
Sliding across the floor
Like the Mastodons
Are here
The shooters
From within
Without
Their weapons 
Matthew Lippman is the author of four poetry collections, Salami Jew (Racing Form Press), American Chew, winner of The Burnside Review Book Prize (Burnside Review Book Press, 2013), Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010), and The New Year of Yellow, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is the recipient of the 2014 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and The Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review.
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