An Effing Foodie

Food Poems: Endive, by Thomas Lux

 

Endive*

If I mix a vegetable and moral metaphor
then this pale,
arrogant little leaf—its juices spare,
its taste pinched
and numbing—is equivalent
to a rich child pulling legs
off a bug, to a swaggering walk through a TB ward
by a pulmonary giant. Not to mention
a pathetic excuse for salad: four, five spiked shards
arranged like spokes
around its hub: a radish delicately carved.
The white plate upon which it sits so bare it blinds me.
Who, forced to wear white butler's gloves,
bends over a row all day
to pick this for a lousy wage
and can't afford or, I'd prefer, refuses
to eat it? It's so pallid
turning to yellow I feel stabbing it
with my fork
would hurt it
or at least be impolite
so I slide the shiny tines beneath a piece
and lift it to my lips
and it's as if I'm eating air
but with a slight afterburn: dust and bone,
privilege and toe-dancing.
So delicate, curling in on itself
in an ultimate self-embrace: fussy, bitter, chaste, clerical
little leaf.

--from "New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux: 1975-1995"

*Many thanks to Tom Lucky for pointing me toward this poem.

Food Poems: Storm Catechism, by Kim Addonizio

 

Storm Catechism

The gods are rinsing their just-boiled pasta
in a colander, which is why
it is humid and fitfully raining
down here in the steel sink of mortal life.
Sometimes you can smell the truffle oil
and hear the ambrosia being knocked back,
sometimes you catch a drift
of laughter in that thunder crack: Zeus
knocking over his glass, spilling lighting
into a tree.  The tree shears away from itself
and falls on a car, killing a high school girl.
Or maybe it just crashes down
on a few trash cans, and the next day
gets cut up and hauled away by the city.
Either way, hilarity.  The gods are infinitely perfect
as is their divine mac and cheese.
Where does the macaroni come from?  Where does matter?
Why does the cat act autistic when you call her,
then bat around a moth for an hour, watching intently
as it drags its wings over the area rug?
The gods were here first, and they're bigger.
They always were, and always will be
living it up in their father's mansion.
You only crawled from the drain
a few millennia ago,
after inventing legs for yourself
so you could stand, inventing fists
in order to raise them and curse the heavens.
Do the gods see us?
Will the waters be rising soon?
The waters will be rising soon.
Find someone or something to cling to.

--from "Lucifer at the Starlite"

Food Poems: Taking Stock, by EF

Taking Stock

“People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want.” --Frank Bruni

Take stock; the beginning of one meal
from the remains of the last,
brewing bones and skimming chaff.
People have fallen out of love with food,
no seeded mysticism or churn blisters;
the sum of a body cellophaned and portioned.

Or maybe not.  Maybe it’s love overlooked--
custard-soft eggs, bitten buttered toast--
or love too rich and freely given,
seconds of coconut curry, jungle-green,
choked with curving eggplants
and bamboo, pliant and plentiful. 

When the one that got away
came back, he cupped my dark-pooled face,
clucked his tongue. “Eat something.”
My mother did the same when he disappeared
for good, handed me the oldest remedy--
rice plumped and redolent of chicken,
golden gelatin, collagen, fat and blood;
the things that hold a body together.

One day, that’ll be me,
ladling simmering stock into long grains,
when really what I mean is,
I’m sorry baby, I know it hurts. 
Some things take time, starch and stock
marrying every kernel--ginger, garlic
and shallots wafting from the bowl.

Food Poems: Saying Grace, by EF

Saying Grace

Give me your controlled rot,
ruby-speckled rows of aging
beef, bottles seasoned in dust--
veins branch penicillin-blue
through spring’s milk, a washed-rind
bite that only comes with time.

Give me your unborn--
your unlaid eggs nestled
in the soup hen, tone of topaz
that never saw the sun--

hand me a pearl spoon
of a million yet-to-be sturgeon
massaged through a sieve with
malossol’s touch of salt--

even the inky urchin cracked
in spiky halves will yield
the secrets to her young--briny,
potential-rich, that taste of perpetuation,
of what was to become life.

No one is innocent.
The local August tomato--
God-fearing, luscious red--
that sweetness, those jellied seeds
running down your chin
they weren’t meant for you. 

Repent?  Hardly.  Who are you
to apologize to?  But say thank you,
for Chrissake, and we’re not talking
to God, unless God was a tomato
flushed with pride, grown
by knowing, gnarled hands.

Hanover Tomatoes from Richmond, VA & Poems of the Tomato-Kind

Feeling Fucked Up

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white    crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

    -Etheridge Knight, The Essential Etheridge Knight

Food Poems: Fat, by Jane Kenyon

Fat

The doctor says it's better for my spine
this way--more fat, more estrogen.
Well, then!  There was a time when a wife's
plump shoulders signified prosperity.

These days my fashionable friends
get by on seaweed milkshakes,
Pall Malls, and vitamin pills.  Their clothes
hang elegantly from their clavicles.

As the evening news makes clear
the starving and the besieged maintain
the current standard of beauty without effort.

Whenever two or three gather together
the talk turns dreamily to sausages,
purple cabbages, black beans and rice,
noodles gleaming with cream, yams, and plums,
and chapati fried in ghee.

       -Jane Kenyon, Otherwise (p. 19)

Food Poems: Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

Love After Love*

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

        -Derek Walcott, from Sea Grapes (1976)

*Much love and thanks to Maggiescratch for sending me this.