You built your own table, the bare boards exposed. By yourself, you kept the top clean, marble smooth. What’s more, you prepared for this dinner, you measured your sauces in stone sake saucers, speckled with pinches of thyme and flicked sage. You knew your spices. But, because you were a man, you could fixate on […]
Poetry 83
Rose McLarney: We’re Not Much for Words, But
Blackberries, suspended in moonshine, enlarged with alcohol, skins stretched taut, almost to bursting and preserved, sit on the shelf. They wait, purple and potent, with the promise that, if we drink, our skins will press together, and our lips will split in speech.
Mara Jebsen: Sundays in Lomé
By the jelly blue lights of an ocean The day wakes, and breaks into sweat Beach saunterers gossip of potions, The power of juju, the wet Face of a madman, whose wife, they said put a spell in with the onions— It was a Sunday of church, vodou, and knife Her stewpots were seized by […]
Kristin Hatch: Sign of the Beefcarver Poem
we were at the break table swatting flies off the au jus. jerky kept laying his bald head on my shoulder & i was like i’m trying to eat my french dip, but probably so timidgirl it sounded like purr, purr. (everything sticky, everything tan) the boys would smoke in the kitchen & probably ash […]
Rachel Contreni Flynn: Ravenous
– for Noah 1. The child holds on inside me: pink bat, drowsy possum. With quick teeth, I eat handfuls of bread and fruit the shape of my own body, pear juice like tears coats the flesh of my arms. 2. At night coyotes send up sparks of hunger and laughter from the frozen field. […]
Daniel Donaghy: Scrapple
Chances are, you’ve had it–– maybe while you were high, with creamed chipped beef and toast, or out with relatives now long gone on a sandwich called the Junk Yard Dog: fried pork roll, fried bacon, fried scrapple and eggs on a soaked bun you couldn’t pick up. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s […]