100 Food poems

There are those who feed only on oranges. — S.Y. Agnon Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. It stands alone, with luster in a far tinge. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. On Saturday it’s blue like an orange Or like a surrealist sight rhyme in a garage. Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. But rime riche is rich enough for an orange. Still my doorman sings, Put it away in storage! It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. Orange replies: I’m drunk from my last bar-binge Half-rhymes like hangovers suddenly impinge. But nothing rhymes in English with an orange. While my wife in French eats one in her nude linge Playwrights Synge and Inge flap forward on a car-hinge. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. Pronounce it orange and then expunge. So ends the story of the very violet orange. Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

There is this tea I have sometimes, Pan Long Ying Hao, so tightly curled it looks like tiny roots gnarled, a greenish-gray. When it steeps, it opens the way you woke this morning, stretching, your hands behind your head, back arched, toes pointing, a smile steeped in ceremony, a celebration, the reaching of your arms.

In a side booth at MacDonald’s before your music class you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio under the poster of the talking hamburger: two white eyes rolling around in the top bun, the thin patty of beef imitating the tongue of its animal nature. You eat merrily. I watch the Oakland mommies, trying to understand what it means to be “single.” * Across from us, females of all ages surround the birthday girl. Her pale lace and insufficient being can’t keep them out of her circle. Stripes of yellow and brown all over the place. The poor in spirit have started to arrive, the one with thick midwestern braids twisted like thought on her head; usually she brings her mother. This week, no mother. She mouths her words anyway across the table, space-mama, time-mama, mama who should be there. * Families in line: imagine all this translated by the cry of time moving through us, this place a rubble. The gardens new generations will plant in this spot, and the food will go on in another order. This thought cheers me immensely. That we will be there together, you still seven, bending over the crops pretending to be royalty, that the huge woman with one blind eye and dots like eyes all over her dress will also be there, eating with pleasure as she eats now, right up to the tissue paper, peeling it back like bright exotic petals. * Last year, on the sun-spilled deck in Marin we ate grapes with the Russians; the KGB man fingered them quickly and dutifully, then, in a sad tone to us “We must not eat them so fast, we wait in line so long for these,” he said. * The sight of food going into a woman’s mouth made Byron sick. Food is a metaphor for existence. When Mr. Egotistical Sublime, eating the pasta, poked one finger into his mouth, he made a sound. For some, the curve of the bell pepper seems sensual but it can worry you, the slightly greasy feel of it. * The place I went with your father had an apartment to the left, and in the window, twisted like a huge bowtie, an old print bedspread. One day, when I looked over, someone was watching us, a young girl. The waiter had just brought the first thing: an orange with an avocado sliced up CCCC in an oil of forceful herbs. I couldn’t eat it. The girl’s face stood for something and from it, a little mindless daylight was reflected. The businessmen at the next table were getting off on each other and the young chardonnay. Their briefcases leaned against their ankles. I watched the young girl’s face because for an instant I had seen your face there, unterrified, unhungry, and a little disdainful. Then the waiter brought the food, bands of black seared into it like the memory of a cage. * You smile over your burger, chattering brightly. So often, at our sunny kitchen table, hearing the mantra of the refrigerator, I’ve thought there was nothing I could do but feed you; and I’ve always loved the way you eat, you eat selfishly, humming, bending the french fries to your will, your brown eyes spotting everything: the tall boy who has come in with his mother, repressed rage in espadrilles, and now carries the tray for her. Oh this is fun, says the mother, You stand there with mommy’s purse. And he stands there smiling after her, holding all the patience in the world.

Glory be to God for breaded things— Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh, Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings, Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye, That in all oils, corn or canola, swim Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!); Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim, These greasy, battered bounties of the South: Eat them.

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches. From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass onto a bamboo table on the side of an island road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight, then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children and younger women, buzzing with a rising gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy, sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face when offered the yellow flesh like thickened petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting. His tongue tingled ripely.This country’s foreign to me

fish carcass say hello to pork rind + arborio rice while castaway caraway puree returns home to deconstruct wilted carrot from its butter + herb remnants fish carcass say goodbye to a knife fight between under-marinated onion slice + wasted redbor kale amidst a gun battle between grilled salmon + paprika fish carcass say goodnight to electrolytes + magnesium as a chemical imbalance takes place inside the borderline cod meat fish carcass say good morning to anti-griddle + orange liqueur whose pre-conditional love for salt + bitterness reminiscent of caviar + pancetta vinaigrette has put quail eggs under the cloche fish carcass say midday to emu eggs while the sun twirls inside a decadent basket of fish sauce without making the plastic mattress, walk-in refrigerator, + bacon sabayon feel left out fish carcass say cloud nine say egginess say shell-shocked say cornichon say it angelo say italian meringue say calf liver say republic of georgia say lavash say turnpike turnips say succotash say yuzu marmalade say overcooked quail say chef teah evans say fish head say into a barrel say bacon fat say baby corn say flavor profile say with victory say the gods are with me say no guts no glory say did not materialize say story on a plate

I saw another ladybug Chicago could win if  I eat the leftover fish & chips in every line so I don’t forget We went to the river called fish & chips We stayed at the fish & chips tower They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation so we could go to school for free It’s called fish & chips college for women

For  Jack Agüeros (1934–2014) I was eight when the blackout struck and the lights died all across the city like a massacre of fireflies. In the projects of Brooklyn, I steered myself to 14F, fingers spread against the cool tiles of the hallway, past the concrete and chicken-wire terrace where I once burnt ants with a magnifying glass. Many years later, at the Chinese restaurant uptown, Jack said:They got any flan here? He was my first poet. I had seen the fireflies in his sonnets blink and float away: Fulano the philosopher in the unemployment line; Blanco the painter, painting in the madhouse; Monterosa the dealer killed by shotgun in a bar on Avenue A; his mother the seamstress and the quick needle of her sewing machine; Jack the moving man, his hands sliced raw. He stacked his apartment with dictionaries in three languages. I knew the raconteur’s grin with every tale:Raúl Juliá is a friend of mine: a Puerto Rican playing Macbeth. He took14curtain calls on opening night. Maybe he would tell me now that flan was not Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or Spanish, but Chinese, invented by a trembling cook to satisfy the palate of an emperor in the Ming Dynasty.No flan, Jack, I said.This is a Chinese restaurant. Two minutes later, he said:They got any flan? I showed him the dog-eared and fingerprinted menu.No flan, I said. When the waiter unfurled his pad, Jack said to him:You got flan? He sang this song for an hour. The egg roll was not flan. The fried rice was not flan. The fortune cookie was not flan.Can we get some flan? he said.Goddammit, Jack, I said. The poets crowded into the bar, striding to the mic. Jack stood with poem in hand, read the title, tilted his head and said it again, studied the page as if the words shriveled up like ants burnt under a magnifying glass, then sat down. I witnessed the massacre of fireflies. A few of us clapped, not knowing what to do with our hands, staring at the sonneteer who lost all his quatrains and couplets in the denim jacket he left on the subway, the words of Fulano still waiting on the unemployment line:The faster you spin, the stiller you look./There’s something to learn in that, but what? After the diagnosis, I handed Jack a book of poems. He dangled the book upside down like a stiff mouse by the tail, something we would sniff  behind the refrigerator. I wanted sonnets. Jack kept singing the chorus of a song: Get me to the church. Get me to the church. Get me to the church on time. At the end, I leaned over Jack’s bed to read his own poem in his ear, but some words come home after the blackout, fingers crawling on the wall. I know what I should have said at the Chinese restaurant:Jack, let’s get some flan. We should have braved the subway at rush hour, straphangers rocking all the way to 14th Street and 8th Avenue, to La Taza de Oro, gone now like Jack, for rice and beans, squid in its own ink, café con leche y flan, Jack: a spoonful of flan for you after all the years of sonnets and bread for me, the steam rising when your hands cracked the crust at the table.

My body is powdery white and round I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond The hand that kneads me is hard and rough You can't destroy my true red heart