Tag: Food

Evie and Adam at the Farmer’s Market 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Ann Strang

After Jack Gilbert 

Scoping out the fattened apples
and snatching QR codes with an iPhone,
Evie, always eager to bootlick, says, in lipstick,
What do you think, Addie, babe? Requiring  

no official arraignment to condemn herself
to death, she proffers in turn Paula Red,
Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Jonagold. Her last ditch:
How about tonight I make tarte tatin,  

or apple crisp? Then, Would you like me to get you
another cup? Careful, take mine. There’s a drip.
Her voice leaping in pitch, she tries to forget
that time she snuck off with fucksome 

Lucifer—Dodge Viper parked in the Johnstone’s
orchard, midnight cigarettes, a demon pretending
his cock’s a rattlesnake to make her laugh.
She stifles a rebel guffaw right now, nearly losing 

it in front of the key limes. Bitching husbands
and fruit can mess with your head, plus
you never know when God might appear pink
aproned on the porch, pie upfront, and eager to snitch. 

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Jam Sandwich

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Kindig

I plunge my hand into my husband’s gut
& squeeze. He giggles, doubles over

like an uncovered pill bug.
He has never had a gut before. We

are both taking pleasure in it,
this soft appendage extending

his silhouette. Of course, he is also
taking some shame. Once,

his stomach was ribbed & rigid
like a Victorian corset. Unlike me,

he never knew his body
to grow unexpectedly, never fingered

an expanding love handle. Now
he has. Now

we take turns touching his tum
& laughing like young mothers, delighted

to discover a new fold in the baby’s
arm. Sometimes

we press our bellies together
& jiggle them. For some reason,

we call this the jam
sandwich. Who knows why.

All I know is it makes me feel
like a child, doing something silly

& a little naughty, joystruck
by all our bodies can be.

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Last Night I Told a Stranger

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Leauna Christensen

Featured Art: Hand of crop woman on crumpled bed sheet by medium photoclub

I am very go with the flow—

I used to wipe down airplane
trays only when they were sticky.

Now my hands have dried
from soap and alcohol.

But they are still the same
hands that fixed your hair

and earring against the pillow
that most likely was not silk

because we did not buy
the premium package

from the funeral home.
Everything is packaged nowadays.

I try not to use plastic bags
for produce. Not because

I’m environmentally conscious
but because I want to slow down

rot. Just a few weeks ago
I finely chopped cilantro and

green onion while the man
I was cooking for drank wine.

He was nervous and high
so we danced to the music

that came from his phone.
He tasted like peach Moscato.

I led him to my room
though I knew nothing would happen.

And by nothing
I meant between the two of us

because here I am
in bed and alone

wishing I could live in that sentence—
nothing will happen.

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Trouble

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: by Clara Peeters

He’d wanted the persimmons
and asked her for them, but when
she gave him the brown paper bag,
brimming over, he was taken
aback. Did he really need that many?
Still, he brought them home
to his wife, and soon
there were persimmons ripening
on the kitchen counters, lining
the windowsills. Each day,
growing more and more succulent
until the air was thick
and sweet with their scent.
At breakfast, he’d break one open
with his spoon—the skin supple
and ready to give—stir it into
his hot cereal. Indescribable,
the taste. And a texture he might
have described as sea creature
meets manna from heaven. When
he ate one, he thought of her.
And when he saw her, he thought
of the persimmons. When her arm
brushed, just barely, against his,
did he imagine they both felt
the same quickening? In myth,
fruit is usually the beginning
of disaster. And the way
they made themselves so obvious—
an almost audible orange
against the white walls—
made him wish he’d never asked
her for them, didn’t have to
smell them sugaring the air
with ruin, as he sat there,
face lowered to the bowl, spooning
the soft pulp into his mouth.

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You Are My Sunshine

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alpay Ulku

Featured Art: Landscape by Paul Nash

We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.

You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.

How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?

Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.

Everyone tenses and ignores him.

It’s my dream to be a paid musician.

A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.

Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.

The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.

It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.

The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.

Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.

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A Brief History of Hunger

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Up from the mire of the primordial soup
came one-celled, tiny cavernous bits
whose innards knew a hollow ache only cured
when their shape-shifting borders engulfed
smaller bits, and came a world more complicated,
the paramecium with its oral groove,
the surprising planaria—nick its frontispiece
and the split becomes two hungry heads!—
then came, as ever, competition begetting variation,
to move or not to move, that was the question—
whether it was more propitious to see
with eyes multitudinous or on stalks or both,
whether it was better to be safely anchored,
waiting in camouflage, or to mount an assault,
evolution’s choices simple, almost biblical—seek
and ye shall find or lurk with bait in the hope that all
will come to him who waits, and then came
specialized beaks and teeth, fanciful horns
and coloration prompting procreation,
as well as a multitude of eating adaptations—
the water bird’s fused nostrils, air sacs in head and neck
to absorb impact as the feathered darts, pillaging
angels, plummet—and came homo sapiens with a myriad
of tastes and ways to cook—sear and braise, sauté
and soufflé, pickle and brine—came table manners, the urge
to gorge, to purge, came sorbet and gourmet, foods
delectable and indigestible, epicurean delights, food fights,
and all the ravenous mouths of tomorrow and tomorrow.

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Red Beans and Rice

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Sprouse

Featured Art: ‘Modes et Manières de Torquat‘

The medium said you were not coming back.
So I ate my red beans and rice
same as on our wedding day
down in Algiers, Louisiana.

The next day you rode
off with the Russian, Porshenokov,
in a little MG, your long straw hair
whipping in the streets

in the wind of the French Quarter
and down on the bayous, where it’s
too hot to sleep. The cemetery on Ramparts
was a forest of stone, the dead

above ground. On account of
the hurricanes, they said, and high water
on the Mississippi that stirs underneath
and raises them up.

That time you came back,
in heat, in sweat, with cotton-mouth
and juju. The South was our
time to be hot.

Next day you shipped out
lithe as a dolphin
rolling and tumbling down to the delta
on whiskey and water we called our lives.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me . . .
on Lake Pontchartrain, in the boat
of our nights, your prodigal smile
alive with fabulous poison.

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Midnight Snack with Leon

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: by nrd

I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.

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Pie

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Micheal Chitwood

Featured Art: Main Street, Montreal by Louis Wiesenberg

That his old Impala still ran
was a miracle. The blue puff of exhaust
and the way the engine rattled on
for a minute or two when he turned off the ignition.
A miracle. He shaved maybe once a week.
And his clothes. The wrinkles and stains
held them together.
But he came to the diner every Tuesday.
Where he got money no one knew.
He would nurse his black coffee
and have a piece of pie.
He wanted to talk about God,
mostly to the county deputies having lunch,
who talked to him as a way of keeping an eye on him.
“God’s grandeur is in his silence,” he told them.
“And the silence is immense and not all that quiet.”
He looked into the bowl of a spoon
as if he was looking into a river.
The deputies joshed with him.
They told the waitresses he was harmless
if a bit ripe.
There was plenty of coffee.
Sometimes a waitress would give him another wedge of pie,
cold lemon, warm apple with a dollop of whipped cream.
The deputies paid, winked, and left.
The leather of their holsters squeaked.
Outside, the afternoon filled the sky.

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Big Media

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Just a glass of water for me, thank you.
One ice cube. Thanks. Just one.
But you should order what you want. Don’t be shy.
And don’t worry about me. Water is all I eat.
That ribeye looks promising, doesn’t it?
The charcuterie platter? The bay shrimp in a nest of deconstructed kale,
     drizzled with truffle oil?
Get what you want and I’ll watch you eat, sipping from my glass of water
like a brilliant bird whose plumage once adorned ladies’ hats, but is now
     available only on the black market,
please don’t mind me.
Did you read about how they beheaded another captured soldier?
Cut his head right off, clean as you like. I know, it’s
terrible. Awful, really. It ought to be a crime,
but the water flushes me out, gives me an inner clean. A kind of peace.
All this war must have been hard on you, the bodies and IEDs and the
     threatening
music. It certainly was hard on our nation, and we weren’t even
there. Broccolini, yes. That’s for him. And the foie gras on toast with foraged
     mushroom and lemon foam,
he’ll take that. I love the look of those cauliflower florets, like petite puffs of
     smoke!
The raviolini afloat in broth like misfired paratroopers!
You’re sweet, but much too thin. You should eat.
They’ll send you back and you’ll be nothing but bones
beneath skin. Did you see how they sliced his head right off?
What do you think of my hat?

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Tuesday Night

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Corrie Lynn White

Featured Image: Madison Square, Snow by Allen Tucker, 1904
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

I lay the sweet potatoes on
the roasting pan on their backs
or bellies—I can’t tell. The oven
is heating and the cat box

needs cleaning so I dip the plastic
shovel into the litter and grieve
that Frankie doesn’t go outside—
sit high in a tree or roll in

a lush patch of clover. I stare
out the window at the neighbor’s
raised beds and convince myself
he’d eat all their basil, puncture

the flesh of their first red tomato,
then run far away. What keeps us
where we are? I throw the plastic
bag of clumped urine into the bin

by the road and look down a few
blocks for a sunset. The sky is pink
past the stoplights. Nothing in nature
is as sudden as turning off the lamp

at night. Inside, I push the pan
into the oven and remember the guy
in my class today who said:
People don’t feel strongly anymore.

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Seafood

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Williamsen

           Baltimore, Maryland

My uncle calls from the wharf; his freighter is in;
he’s walked to the nearest food and I find him
in a crab shack at a table by the window.
Waitresses carry crabs on trays, whole piles of them—
stiff, blue, dead—and the restaurant patter crackles
with the brittle speech of small mallets on their shells.
Elena, his wife—she’s from Colombia, my age—
wants a divorce. She’s living in Miami
with some Cuban, he says; she’s got his TV and his car.
When his crabs come, I order grilled cheese,
tell him about karma, how I’ve removed myself
from the chain of suffering and he says, shit,
picks up a crab and whacks it squarely on the back.
He tells me about winters on Superior, ice boats
cracking a path through December until the solid freeze
of January, how he shoveled iron ore from the hold
until the red dust rose in clouds from his clothing,
rinsed from his body in the shower like a gallon of blood;
and before that, how he went to Vietnam while my father
went to college, how he bombed the jungle beneath him
without ever looking down while my father dropped
out of college without ever looking ahead;
and before that, before the war, how the two of them
hit a tree one night while driving on River Road.
You’d have thought we wanted to be that tree, he says.
It broke the car, broke seven of his ribs, nearly broke
my father’s heart but in the end it just broke his spleen
and ripped him open from shoulder to hip.
My great aunt—the whole family tells the story now—
came from Kansas and prayed him back from the dead.

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The Ideal Budweiser Customer Watches a Budweiser Commercial

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Danny Caine

Featured Art: Drugs by Richard Estes

Oh shit I love “Landslide.”
I was going to get up to piss but then I heard me some Fleetwood Mac.
Hey that’s a pretty farm, too. Farms are dope.
Wait, oh goddamn it it’s a baby horse lying in some fucking sawdust.

That baby horse is so cute I can’t even handle it right now.
I am literally unsure how to proceed.
And now the horse is being fed from a bottle?
The hell am I supposed to do with that?

Dammit now the horse and the dude are playing and stuff.
Fuck me if I don’t love a playful goddamn horse.
Look! A Budweiser truck. Budweiser!

I should like this brand on Facebook.
I should follow this brand on Twitter.
I really should make an effort to engage
with this brand on social media.

Wait, that’s a horse trailer. And our dude
is shaking hands with the driver? Is he—

DUDE YOU CAN’T SELL THAT FUCKING HORSE!

YOU’RE GOING TO MISS HIM SO MUCH!

Somebody get me a Budweiser.

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Stupid Sandwich

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “The Grocer’s Encyclopedia” by an unknown artist

So yeah, we all have these moments that suck
because what they mean
is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year
good a team as any, traded
what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude
with a wicked right arm
and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,
standing here I don’t know how long and still
no damn bus. But like I was saying
we all have these moments and last week
there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,
the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make
when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling
and I feel like being true to myself
is about the dumbest thing a man can do,
knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.

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Ocean State Job Lot

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Burt

No one is going to make
     much more of this stuff now, or ever again.

Graceless in defeat
     but beautiful, harmless and sad
on shelves that overlap like continents,

these Cookie Monster magnets, miniature
     monster trucks, scuffed multiple Elmos, banners

that say NO FEAR
     and A GRILL FOR EVERY BOY
are a feast for every sense.

Some would be bad manners
     to give or bring home-

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Cake

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Image: Landscape by Peter von Bemmel 1685-1754

She’s in the first booth left of the planters.
She’s been waiting an hour now.
She’s been waiting at the Watertown Family Buffet
with her little girl who’s dreamed up
some kind of a costume:
giant glasses, backwards cap, taffeta gown
which is clearly for him, for Al who’s
just now arriving, finally, and now

he’s seen them, and now
he’s walking over, and now
he’s standing there, standing there,
husband and father, or boyfriend and father,
or boyfriend and father figure, except he’s way too late,
he’s too late times two and the party’s over
thank-you, and, no, they’re not having,
not the grin, not the story, not the hug.

The woman gets up, and then, face baggy with patience,
she nods to the girl who scoots out too,
and they exit together.
So over the chips and spilt dip,
over the drained Pepsi and the big white cake
with “Al” in caps and quotes
he watches them go,
looks out at the parking lot,
opens his book.
Here’s the waitress with her pad and pen.
And what in hell is he reading?

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A Discreet Charm

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephen Dunn

Featured Art: Luncheon Still Life by John F. Francis

Our good friends are with us, Jack and Jen, 
old lefties with whom we now and then share
what we don’t call our wealth. We clink our
wine glasses, and I say, Let’s drink to privilege . . .

the privilege of evenings like this.
All our words have a radical past, and Jack
is famous for wanting the cog to fit the wheel,
and for the wheel to go straight

down some good-cause road. But he says
No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn
as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages—
his smile the bent arrow only the best men

can point at themselves. I serve the salad
Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel,
and fine, stinky cheese. It’s too beautiful to eat,
Jen says, but means it only as a compliment.

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Cherry Pop-Tarts®

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Heather McNaugher

Featured Art: Sweet Tooth by Dylan Petrea

I decide this will be it, my last pop-tart, cherry,
as I stand at the circ desk of the college library
and tear up your number
which I had written on a Post-it®, Hello Kitty®,
and then stuck to my ID.
The computer says I love you I owe 29 dollars
for Frank O’Hara and that thesaurus
I borrowed when I taught the class
how to find a synonym. I’m sorry. Hello Kitty’s ears
are burning—so tiny, so pink,
and so I pulverize them.
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Fortune Cookie

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Maura Stanton

6 a.m. It’s cold and raining and you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s one of
those days when you’d like to stay home from work, curled up somewhere
comfortable and nice with your knees against your chest. Why not inside a for-
tune cookie? And at once you imagine yourself inside the sweet crispy shell, the
paper fortune wrapped around your body like a sheet. You’re about to close
your eyes and go back to sleep when you start to worry about the fortune. Is
this one of those really good fortunes like the one you’ve kept in your wallet
for years, You will never need to worry about a steady income? Or is it more
sinister like the one you pulled out last month, Idleness is the holiday of fools?
You want to read your fortune but you’ve got to break out of the cookie shell.
Only you can’t. You’re paralyzed. This is someone else’s fortune cookie, and you’ve got to wait patiently until they pour the tea, and crack it open. Then
they’ll laugh and read your fortune out loud for everyone to hear, Your prob-
lem lies not in a lack of ability but in a lack of ambition.

Chefs

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Art: The White Tablecloth by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

So there the world was, right smack up against the proverbial edge of time. No one was surprised that some people were leaping from skyscrapers while others were attempting pointless last-minute conceptions of offspring; & that in every city & town, acts of extraordinary altruism & vindictiveness had become so common as to go unreported. And no one was surprised that there was a spike in the number of couples suddenly eager to be married, but the spike was so dramatic, in fact, & the usual officials (rabbis, priests, justices  of the peace, notaries public, & ships’ captains) were so beleaguered, that a squadron of kamikaze chefs had to be deployed to perform emergency nuptials for the multitudes of entities & identities demanding official union before the end of all things. Everyone knew someone who was calling for the chefs, those professionals capable of creating the alchemical events these transformations required, some of which would almost certainly release such molecular & ontological ferocity as to create titanic conflagrations, thus depriving some of the chefs of their precious last few weeks of life.

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At the Dinner Party

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Dunn

Featured Art: A Family Meal by Evert Pieters

As usual, we were trying to please each other,

so Ryan told a story about a water buffalo,

a lion, and a crocodile, which reminded

Julie about a coyote and a groundhog, and

I could not help but offer my favorite of

this kind—involving the tarantula

and its natural enemy the digger wasp. The

problem was that each story was true,

therefore that much more difficult to tell,

and each had in it an element of the fabulous,

and therefore the promise of a moral.

Linda, the contrarian, asked us if we had heard

the one about the priest and the rabbi,

but was booed, and kept quiet for a while.

In each story an animal was in danger, one

always slightly more sympathetic

than another. The water buffalo rescued

her injured calf from first the crocodile

then the lion, the coyote got bored

with the groundhog and returned to the woods,

and the tarantula just stood there, frozen,  while

the digger wasp dug its grave.

Ryan and Julie selected their details well,

paced and arranged them, as I hope I did,

and it wasn’t that our intent was to avoid

a moral, but that there was none to be had,

this being nature we were talking about

with its choiceless whims and atrocities.

Linda, of course, said she forgave none of it.

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Chicken

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephen Cramer

Featured Image: For Sunday’s Dinner by William Michael Barnett

At the festival when we were celebrating
harvest with pumpkin tarts & cider,
an older farmer asked what I was into
& maybe my answer was muffled a bit
from the cider’s tang because he started
talking passionately not about his favorite poet
or the use of weather in haiku
but about his chickens: White Leghorns,
Silkie Bantams, Rhode Island Reds,
Plymouth Rocks, how, in Corporate Agriculture
the birds are bred so big that their legs
cripple beneath them & isn’t that a shame.
I tried to break in, to tell him he misheard.
But he shook his head & held up his finger.
That’s not the case with his birds.
When his hens are laying he puts oyster shells
in their grit to give them extra calcium
for their own shells. His birds are free range—
not debeaked & stuffed two dozen
to a pen. No, his birds can go anywheres they want
from the barn to the bog & even in the house.
Read More