100 Food poems

simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with delight. In the yard we plant rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes, cupping wet earth over tubers, our labor the germ of later sustenance and renewal. Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes. I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures.

The Seneca carry stories in satchels. They are made of  pounded corn and a grandmother’s throat. The right boy will approach the dampness of a forest with a sling, a modest twining wreath for the bodies of  birds. A liquid eye. When ruffed from leaves, the breath of  flight is dissolute. What else, the moment of  weightlessness before a great plunge? In a lost place, a stone will find the boy. Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story. A stone, too, admits hunger. The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks. What necklace will his grandmother make now. The sun has given the stone a mouth. With it, she sings of what has been lost. She sings and sings and sings. The boy listens, forgets, remembers. Becomes distracted. The necklace will be heavy, impossible to wear.

How easily happiness begins by dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions. This could mean soup or risotto or chutney (from the Sanskrit chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions go limp and then nacreous and then what cookbooks call clear, though if they were eyes you could see clearly the cataracts in them. It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare and rage and murmury animal comfort that infant humans secrete. This is the best domestic perfume. You sit down to eat with a rumor of onions still on your twice-washed hands and lift to your mouth a hint of a story about loam and usual endurance. It’s there when you clean up and rinse the wine glasses and make a joke, and you leave the minutest whiff of it on the light switch, later, when you climb the stairs.

“Dead people don’t like olives,” I told my partners in eighth grade dancing class, who never listened as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. The dead people I often consulted nodded their skulls in unison while I flung my black velvet cape over my shoulders and glowered from deep-set, burning eyes, walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, crazy for cheerleaders and poems. At Hamden High football games, girls in short pleated skirts pranced and kicked, and I longed for their memorable thighs. They were friendly—poets were mascots— but never listened when I told them that dead people didn’t like olives. Instead the poet, wearing his cape, continued to prowl in solitude intoning inscrutable stanzas as halfbacks and tackles made out, Friday nights after football, on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms with magnanimous cheerleaders. But, decades later, when the dead have stopped blathering about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders waiting for hip replacements, while a lascivious, doddering poet, his burning eyes deep-set in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

Breakfast Tacos, from the series Seven Days, 2003, by Chuck Ramirez Let me be your last meal. Let me harvest the notes I took from your mother’s watery hands, street vendors in Rome, Ms. Rosie from our taquería, you: in the sun, in the open air, let me give you zucchini and their elusive blossoms — my arms, my hands. Pumpkiny empanadas of my feet, pulpy as a newborn’s. Guisada’d loin of my calf muscle. On a plate white and crisp as the ocean, lemoned eyeballs like two scallops. The red, ripe plum of my mouth. Perhaps with coffee, you’d have the little lobe of my ear sugared as a wedding cookie. The skin of my belly, my best chicharrón, scrambled with the egg of my brain for your breakfast tacos. My lengua like lengua. Mi pescuezo, el mejor hueso. Let me be your last meal: mouthfuls of my never-to-be-digested face, my immovable femur caught in your throat like a fish bone. Let my body be what could never leave your body.

Early in the morning a dough rises from the bowl curling upward. He clenches his fists of bean paste, his mouth dripping a black cocoa stream    ... Hey, I say, have you just smuggled nine knife mountains and nine oil pans from hell? Deep-fried ghosts are the sweetest the crispiest the most intelligent even in burned rims, and taste even better with soybean drinks. He droops his sad expressions like Oedipus’s crutch. Collapsed in the steamer, he squeaks out a sweet smell of duck soup from his soul — quack, quack. Translated from the Chinese

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times When I’m eating fried chicken When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken, When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country, The various blood debts you owe me, My past humiliations and my future crimes— Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken. But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything That’s not generally available to mankind. (Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.) And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots, And meat brings humiliation, And each gasp of air Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Tonight's your lucky night, boys. Look what I fixed for you! Stood all day in the burning sun to make this son-of-a-gun stew. Longhorn steaks two inches thick, dig in while they're hot. The coffee'll keep you up all night, belly up to the pot. You know your Cookie loves you, boys, loves to see you fed. Stood all day in the burning sun to bake this sourdough bread. Sop up all the stew, boys, take another steak. Have another hunk of bread. You know I love to bake. You know your Cookie loves you, boys, tell you what I'll do— tomorrow I'll fix steak and bread and a big old pot of stew!

What’ll it be? Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo. Whaddaya want on it? A swipe of mayo. Pepper but no salt. You got it. Roast beef on rye. You want lettuce on that? No. Just tomato and mayo. Tomato and mayo. You got it. …Salt and pepper? No salt, just a little pepper. You got it. No salt. You want tomato. Yes. Tomato. No lettuce. No lettuce. You got it. …No salt, right? Right. No salt. You got it. Pickle? No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo. And pepper. Pepper. Yes, a little pepper. Right. A little pepper. No pickle. Right. No pickle. You got it. Next! Roast beef on whole wheat, please, With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice Of beefsteak tomato. The lettuce splayed, if you will, In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus, And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded In a multi-foil arrangement That eschews Bragdonian pretensions Or any idea of divine geometric projection For that matter, but simply provides A setting for the tomato To form a medallion with a dab Of mayonnaise as a fleuron. And—as eclectic as this may sound— If the mayonnaise can also be applied Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll And as a festoon below the medallion, That would be swell. You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva? Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. You got it. Next!