CNF: Marzipan
by Claire Polders
Not as thrilling as an arrabbiata, not as erotic as bitter chocolate, not as invigorating as a lemon sorbet on a summer afternoon, but known like your husband’s eyes and rich like gold is the taste of the marzipan fruits made by the dolceria of the Santa Caterina monastery in Palermo, Sicily, where the current pastry chefs use the hand-me-down recipes of the nuns who used to live there in little barred rooms with little square desks and little baby Jesus dolls on makeshift altars to produce a rich variety of traditional cakes and crunchy cannoli filled with sheep-cheese ricotta and sesame cookies and in the fall, when it’s the season, a collection of marzipan fruits— peaches, prickly pears, persimmons, everything—all perfectly rendered in size, color, and shape, and of which you need to take only one bite, there in the monastery courtyard under the citrus trees, to bring tears to your eyes and be taken back to that innocent time from before your parents’ divorce, before your parents’ deaths, when you were still a child and not yet a girl, and remember how your parents left marzipan fruits in the shoes that your brother and you had put near the door in the hope that Saint Nicolas would come by for a visit during your sleep to take your carrots for his white horse and leave sugary treats for you in exchange, treats that didn’t taste as nourishing as Oma’s apple pie, not as warming as your father’s barbecued potatoes, not as forbidden as your mother’s ham-filled croissants, but that tasted like goodness itself, as if the sweet almond paste melting on your tongue told the story of a benevolent world where you could trust everyone and would never find yourself crying in a monastery courtyard in the fall feeling both loved and abandoned, orphaned in more than one way.
Claire Polders grew up in the Netherlands and now roams the world. Recurrent themes in her novels and short prose are identity, feminism, social justice, art, and death. She works on a memoir about elder abuse, a speculative novel, and a short story collection. Learn more about her creative process, travels, publications, and the books she loves at www.clairepolders.com.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Marzipan”? I wrote “Marzipan” as a form experiment on Mexico’s Isla Mujeres during the 2022 SmokeLong Summer Workshop. I chose the skeleton of one long sentence unrolling between stacked comparisons like a dare: Can you write something within this restricted framework that makes sense? Without knowing what I wanted to say, I filled in words that fitted together yet not necessarily in a meaningful way, and I made many false starts. Slowly, the sweet, rich taste of Sicilian marzipan began to haunt the piece and I sensed that I was writing memoir. But it wasn’t until I read the word “goodness” on the page that I understood why the treat from the nuns had stayed with me and had left me feeling so cherished and sad.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/13 • Paul Beckman
05/20 • Nancy Lord
05/27 • Claudio Perinot
06/03 • Amanda Chiado
06/10 • John Davies
06/17 • Lynne Jensen Lampe
06/24 • Valeria Valdez
07/01 • Carly Katz
07/08 • Meg Eden
07/15 • TBD
07/22 • TBD
07/29 • TBD
08/05 • TBD
08/12 • TBD
08/19 • TBD
08/26 • TBD
09/02 • TBD
09/09 • TBD
09/16 • TBD
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD