The Joy of Cooking

When I got done reading Elaine Magarrell's poem The Joy of Cooking, I wasn't really sure what had just happened.  What a gory image!  I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the speaker of this poem isn't very fond of her siblings.  However, as grotesque as the culinary plotting of family organs was, I feel like the particular body parts the speaker chose were symbolic.  The tongue was used to characterize her sister.  The fact that she chose the tongue of all body parts leads me to believe that her sister had a smart mouth, or just often said things the narrator didn't want to hear.  But when she says "it will probably grow back" (Magarrell, handout), it makes it seem as though her sister's tongue can only be subdued for a short period of time before she continues her apparently unpleasant banter.  She says that her brother's heart needs lots of frilly trimmings to "make it interesting at all" (Magarrell, handout).  Is her brother so heartless that he might as well not have a heart at all?  Perhaps, in order to 'eat' his heart, it would need all of those extra seasonings because he has no love of anything in his life.  The narrator seems very bitter towards both of her siblings.  Perhaps she wants one to STOP talking and one to START feeling something within him.