The Joy of Cooking
By: Elaine Magarrell

I found this poem to be extremely disturbing.  Magarrell clearly has some resentment towards her brother and sister.  I also believe that she probably possesses some kind of mental disorder.  The descriptions she gives of hurting her siblings is not normal.  In the first stanza, she describes skinning her sister's tongue.  "I have prepared my sister's tongue, scrubbed and skinned it..."  This is not a normal way to begin a poem, especially not one about your own family!  She describes slicing her sister's tongue as well; she even considers different sauces that she can put on her sister's tongue after doing this.  This crazy idea makes me think that Magarrell's sister must have verbally insulted her.  In the second stanza, Magarrell continues to prove that she is crazy.  She says that she will slowly cook her brother's heart to eat.  She also explains that her brother had a small heart.  "Although beef heart serves six my brother's heart barely feeds two."  Magarrell definitely has some sort of unresolved bitterness towards her two siblings.  Overall, this poem leaves me with one question: what did her siblings even do to her?!