Cormac Kirby





The two of us/a spicebag (2023 - Sour Cherry Mag)



The tuna always disappears

I always finish the peanut butter

You want more vegetable proteins

I am famished without my daily meat

We toast glutinous and gluten free

They take different time in your dad’s old toaster

You make light work of wilted spinach

Garlic, sunflower oil and frying pan,

not much can go wrong

You like short grain

I like long grain sometimes,

but I’ve learned to appreciate those fat little things.

You can drink coffee at 10pm 

I can toss endlessly and sweat after just one in the late afternoon 

We’re both for butter, which is a relief

margarine is for losers

You don’t eat it for breakfast though, 

you run out of the house empty

Liquid confidence, without the alcohol

I stuff myself with bread or cereal, stumble out satiated

 at a clip, full

You used to have ice cream for dinner every night

In the summer I’d get grapes

My mum can’t eat garlic

Your mum can’t eat chilli

How’s that for pungency?

It’s like we share a matriarch deep down - plain old chicken stock

The shared Chinese-Irish connection

It’s the only shared thing apart Dave’s Irish-Chinese on Barkly St

Where they learned to put double fried chicken and vinegar together

and called it a spice-bag

are we are spice-bag?

Sounds pretty hot.




Text


Cormac Kirby is a poet and urban planner living on unceded Wurundjeri and Bunurong land. 
He is interested in multi-disciplinary poetry, spatial poetry and how where we live influences our understanding of the universe.