100 Food poems

“Make flour into dough,” she answers, “and fire will turn it into food. Ash is the final abstraction of matter. You can just brush it away.” She tacks a sheet of paper to the wall, dips her hand in a palette of flour and ash, applies the fine soft powders with a fingertip, highlighting in chalk and graphite, blending, blurring with her thumb. Today she is working in seven shades of gray. Outside the door, day lilies in the high flush of summer- about-to-be-fall. Her garden burns red and yellow in the dry August air and is not consumed. Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy particulate smoke thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow. The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp with their boxy suitcases, ashen shoes. When I get too close she yanks me back. She hovers over her creation though she too has a mind to brush against that world and wipe it out.

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 4234 Baking two parts flour to one part water could stop a bullet. So good soldiers carried their hardtack over their hearts. Break it down with a rifle butt, flood it, fry it in pig fat to make hellfire stew. Gnaw it raw and praise the juice. Does wheat prepare for this as it grows, seeking the light in a half-thawed field? Do stalks know their strength is merely in their number? What is ground down we name flour in promise that it will be made useful. Otherwise, it’s just dust. Sheet iron crackers. Teeth-dullers. Would you call it starving, if a man dies with hardtack still tucked in his pocket? Can you call it food, if the bullet comes only at the moment he gives in and swallows?

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return it would have rotted on the vine. So I cut the first tomato into eighths, salted the pieces in the dusk and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's) or bitter, even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem that made my throat feel dusty and warm. Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness. The miser accused by her red sums. Better had I eaten the dirt itself on this the first night in my life when I have not been too busy for my loneliness— at last, it comes.

Now I know that I’ve never described anything, not one single thing, not the flesh of the avocado which darkens so quickly, though if you scrape what’s been exposed to the air it’s new-green beneath like nothing ever happened. I want to describe this evening, though it’s not spectacular. The baby babbling in the other room over the din and whistle of a football game, and now the dog just outside the door, scratching, rattling the tags on her collar, the car going by, far away but loud, a car without a muffler, and the sound of the baby returning again, pleasure and weight. I want to describe the baby. I want to describe the baby for many hours to anyone who wishes to hear me. My feelings for her take me so far inside myself I can see the pure holiness in motherhood, and it makes me burn with success and fear, the hole her coming has left open, widening. Last night we fed her some of the avocado I’ve just finished eating while writing this poem. Her first food. I thought my heart might burst, knowing she would no longer be made entirely of me, flesh of my flesh. Startled in her amusing way by the idea of eating, she tried to take it in, but her mouth pushed it out. And my heart did burst.

Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars. Then two young men, who cooked him, carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his body striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting, his legs long, much longer than a cat’s, and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl. Now I see his head, as he takes his place at the center of the table, his wide pig’s head; and he looks like the javelina that ran in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson, and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig, with his large ears cocked forward, with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth in a jaw propped open by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes, his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out. This afternoon they read directions from a book:The eyeballs must be removed or they will burst during roasting.

curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.

The olla knocked with steam. The masa cooked. She said her eyes are china. The vowel switched on an aura, a shine that sheens the threshold. The vowel was spell: an i that might we, an i that echoes how we’re seen and see. Eye dentity. Ay Dios, she exclaimed surrounded by photos — niños and nietos — where I’m the only chino. How might I see through my family’s eyes — an owl’s eyes in ojos and one in its lid turned sideways 目 — I wondered with her at the table where we placed one olive — ojo negro — in each hoja, that worn folio for field corn’s field notes. What does that dark eye in the ear’s husk see?

Coconut Milk, 2015

Slowly the white dream wrestle(s) to life hands shaping the salt and the foreign cornfields the cold flesh kneaded by fingers is ready for the charcoal for the black wife of heat the years of green sleeping in the volcano. the dream becomes tougher. settling into its shape like a bullfrog. suns rise and electrons touch it. walls melt into brown. moving to crisp and crackle breathing edge of the knife of the oven. noise of the shop. noise of the farmer. market. on this slab of lord. on this table w/ its oil-skin cloth on this altar of the bone. this sacrifice of isaac. warm dead. warm merchandise. more than worn merchandise life itself. the dream of the soil itself flesh of the god you break. peace to your lips. strife of the multitudes who howl all day for its saviour who need its crumbs as fish. flickering through their green element need a wide glassy wisdom to keep their groans alive and this loaf here. life now halted. more and more water add- itive. the dream less clear. the soil more distant its prayer of table. bless of lips. more hard to reach w/ penn- ies. the knife that should have cut it. the hands that should have broken open its victory of crusts at your throat. balaam watching w/ red leak -ing eyes. the rats finding only this young empty husk sharp- ening their ratchets. your wife going out on the streets. searching searching her feet tapping. the lights of the motor- cars watching watching round- ing the shape of her girdle. her back naked rolled into night into night w/out morning rolled into dead into dead w/out vision rolled into life into life w/out dream

Start with the square heavy loaf steamed a whole day in a hot spring until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast grow dense as a black hole of bread. Let it age and dry a little, then soak the old loaf for a day in warm water flavored with raisins and lemon slices. Boil it until it is thick as molasses. Pour it in a flat white bowl. Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream to melt in its brown belly. This soup is alive as any animal, and the yeast and cream and rye will sing inside you after eating for a long time.