Roll call: Amuse-Bouches, Cocktails, Dim Sum Happy Hour, Platters and Platters of Desserts, Endless Seafood, Fast Food, Buffets, and Feasts.
Examples from the Food and Beverage genre:
“Flower yourself / Until you can’t recognize what exists underneath. Until you / Are diminished.”
“Many of us feel more comfortable in “the back of the house” because that is where flavor originates. Where the cooking happens.”
“What if the fridge is the hearth inverted, the homestead represented, not by flickering warmth, but by frigid eternity?”
“Figure out what is missing and learn to live without it.”
“Sacred foods taste better, / but they always come with rules.”
“It’s salt and pleasure, at the end of it, before/ the daylight, that I want.”
“In this country, to be palatable / is to swim and drown at the same time.”
“comedy / is tragedy plus thyme.“
“At the Chinese buffet, my Father loves to try new foods. / We follow him. We keep up with suburbia. Keep up with the jonesing.
“When I think of food, I don’t necessarily think of literal ingredients. Instead, I imagine everything that goes into community nourishment — the cultures, histories, lessons, family lineages, beloved recipes, social migrations, and geographical influences, each a form of resistance.”
“jack eats spoiled food la la la la la”
“Sing at the top of my lungs, pretend I am whistle-tone Mariah / as I whine my hips, a triple threat with my smile”
“In this poem, which is an attempt at condensing superfluous (elitist?) (white?) logic into bite-sized words, further packaged within the sonnet form, further stretched left-to-right, the poet analyzes…”
“in the slim hallway of my kitchen / my father
cleans the crabs without the usual silver tools /”
