Food and Beverage: “Queer Canapés & Other Morsels” by Adrian Dallas Frandle
Queer Canapés
I bubble forth with queer savorings. Faggy food thoughts and gossip, like recipes, need to be archived to be sampled in the future. Food, too, can become endangered. And, like recipes, faggy food thoughts and gossip may provide instructions for how to create and re-create The Delicious. Here are some morsels, presented as canape to the canon, or at least little bites for the individual to enjoy, and like queerness, like writing, like reading, they replenish (you may always return to the tray, to the page, for seconds, for thirds, for beyond). Here are a few, you may pick and choose by what fancies you:
My gay husband once worked as a theater intern. It was during the touring days of the now late, but then famously salty musical comedy legend, Elaine Stritch. Her husband was a successful English muffin magnate, so she would gift them to everyone: cast, crew, friends. That is incidental to the main thread: my-gay-husband-the-intern approached her toward the end of one night’s run. Great show, he is supposed to have said. To which she replied, who is that? He reminded her, the one who brings your yogurt. She is reported to have paused and then blurted out, Oh! The kind with the fruit on the bottom!, before going back on stage and finishing her set. Gay husband says this is one of the most important jobs a young gay could get.
Transforming into a mineral is a personal choice. All those admirable pillar women turned toward something. They turned toward a light.
When I worked as a line cook the most important lesson I learned was to let someone know when you are behind them.
Many of us feel more comfortable in “the back of the house” because that is where flavor originates. Where the cooking happens.
In the instructions for her famous hash brownies, Alice B Toklas notes the eater can expect, “Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality.” Queer effects, queer recipe.
The second most important lesson that I learned in the kitchen is that scars may be marks of pride, records of the queer times when something went wrong, but the teaching was taught and learning was wrought on the body.
Each crisis of hunger creates new lines of connection, new opportunities to try new confections. Comfort eating may be more than habit, but our wish to survive the world that feeds us. Our eyes exceed our stomach, how desire defies time. Like steam from the pot, it rises.
All the food you can sub for lube also (generally) make good dairy replacements. Sex and baking share many of the same ingredients.
A small pinch of cayenne or other chili awakens any dish, drags it into morning light. Capsaicin literally burns one’s taste receptors, a thrilling sensation! That is why spicy is of the queerest of flavors: the heat is an opening, an invitation.
Are you full yet? What will you do with your lack
of hunger? Go, feed others, then, & be fed.
How A Drama Queen Hosts Their Mid-Life Crises
M— suggests open face sandwiches, anything
deceptively lacking & yet somehow complete.
I’ll drink to that, Stritch would have said.
She would have fed her crises english muffins.
Famously, all the good ones are gone the way
of Sondheim. He’d have fed his vexes
a fine sherry wine, or maybe a meat pie.
Regardless, an erudite audience would love it.
I feed mine meringues or trays on trays
of mini raspberry soufflés, all on the rise,
to remind them how delicious the moment
of collapse can taste (despite all that labor!)
& that even in falling, there wisps up grace
to be taken in, imbibed & utterly savored.
Pot Wisps
To have the good sense of a sun-dried tomato.
Your yogurt is your own: you get to decide how to distribute the fruit.
Let yourself ferment. There is much to be gained by cooperation with organisms who fizz.
All soup is gay in that way that it hugs the bowl and yet is a puddle.
If a fruit clings too tightly to the stone, let it.
A boiling pot may watch you back, lest you turn around and salt it.
In the Old Myths cooking aligned with magic. The New Myths call it wellness.
Fear the New Myths, they are poisonous.
If eyes are too big for the stomach, lose the gag reflex & gain insight.
The mouth is a gift: give of it freely and to it freely much is given.
You can hold the slotted spoon, but it cannot hold you.
You may be more like a sieve than you’d care to admit to.
On some level, even to a plant, fire is what nourishes.
Clutch the soup bowl, the outside of its hollow. Drink and let it fill you.
About Adrian Dallas Frandle
Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a queer fish who writes poems to the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Press. “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” out now with Kith Books. Find work online at adriandallas.com
