MYTHOLOGY OF A COCOA MAKER

Eoghan Totten

We keep you beside the kettle to which you’re similar in height.
You only weigh three pounds but feel more like six when lifted
by your sole handle jutting out at a right angle to your body,
its bevel flaring outwards at the top. Removing your lid reveals
a hollow vessel with a matte chrome surface. We fill you
with chocolate shavings and milks hulled from grains and pulses.
You come to life at the touch of a solo button
and the liquids inside you start to churn of their own accord.
Though you have no moving parts, your screech lies somewhere
between the crow and owl when your invisible magnetic coils
excite your sap, sluicing towards boiling point. We lift you up
and the pivot point of your weight  is the moment when
the blacksmith upends his brimming melting pot into a mold,
or when an oil pump swings in the fields of Azerbaijan.
Your fractions are the consistency of satin. You’re the Michelin
chef’s cast iron skillet that mustn’t be washed, only wiped.
We go into the garden with your warmth inside us like whiskey,
fortified briefly from a mythic decline that’s late in the day.
We lie on the grass and stare up through the catalpa tree
at the moon, whose halo is a molinillo whisking atole in the night.

We keep you beside the kettle to which you’re similar in height.
You only weigh three pounds but feel more like six when lifted
by your sole handle jutting out at a right angle to your body,
its bevel flaring outwards at the top. Removing your lid reveals
a hollow vessel with a matte chrome surface. We fill you
with chocolate shavings and milks hulled from grains and pulses.
You come to life at the touch of a solo button
and the liquids inside you start to churn of their own accord.
Though you have no moving parts, your screech lies somewhere
between the crow and owl when your invisible magnetic coils
excite your sap, sluicing towards boiling point. We lift you up
and the pivot point of your weight  is the moment when
the blacksmith upends his brimming melting pot into a mold,
or when an oil pump swings in the fields of Azerbaijan.
Your fractions are the consistency of satin. You’re the Michelin
chef’s cast iron skillet that mustn’t be washed, only wiped.
We go into the garden with your warmth inside us like whiskey,
fortified briefly from a mythic decline that’s late in the day.
We lie on the grass and stare up through the catalpa tree
at the moon, whose halo is a molinillo whisking atole in the night.

Eoghan Totten recently completed a Master of Arts in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, where he is one of two inaugural Michael Longley scholars. His poems have appeared in The Stinging Fly (forthcoming), Magma (forthcoming), Local Wonders: Poems of our Surrounds (Dedalus Press) and more. He holds a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon scholar at Hertford College. In Summer 2022, he received an Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust student award, and made the shortlist for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He lives in Belfast with his partner.