A poem without punctuation is female. – Pauline Ambrozy The comma is female, The exclamation point male, The semi-colon is fem bi-curious sub 29 Virginia. The apostrophe is prosperous, possessive (femme) The colon looks both ways before crossing the street (m). The fast-running dash can’t make up his mind about the curvaceous question mark lurking […]
Prose
Kristin Dombek: Monkeys Might Fly
(An Adynaton) My husband and I have made a quiet and comfortable life together in Brooklyn. I teach at a university and he has his own business down the street from our apartment building. Most evenings, we arrive home from work around 8:00 or so, and order Mexican food, sushi, pizza, or deli sandwiches. If […]
Molly Schultz: Cooking the National Dish of Uzbekistan
Here’s a recipe that may seem novel, perhaps even formidable. But the pursuit, if you set yourself to the task, will not disappoint. Osh-palov (also plov or simply osh) is the national dish of Uzbekistan, a land-locked country in Central Asia not unlike Italy in shape, a right boot to match the left, with courtyards […]
Jonah Lehrer: Food Memory
A few dozen pages into Swann’s Way, after Proust has finished documenting his insomnia in clinical detail, the narrator dips a little cookie into a cup of lime-flower tea. Everybody knows what happens next: it’s one of the most famous literary scenes of all time, in which Marcel recovers his lost memories of childhood in […]
Nina Mukerjee Furstenau: Biting Through the Skin
My first memories of trips to India while growing up are of my grandparents, a neighbor girl named Sweeti, and craggy faces of rickshaw drivers. Under these vivid mind pictures, though, is a feeling that loosens something under my sternum. It stems from the awe of seeing my father look taller, more vitally part of […]
Ann Lightcap Bruno: Notes on Hunger
1. The parent of all industries is Hunger. – Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, 1894 Herr Doktor told me to arrive at nine, Sunday morning. Eat only lightly in the evening. Nothing after. That night Paul and I ate bowls of bean soup at the Formica table in our two-room […]