...walk into a bar in America. Butterworth says, I’m being repackaged. Ben says, I’m being rebranded. Jemima says, I remember when they branded my mama on her back.
The bartender says, I could stand in the middle of Main Street and kill somebody and I wouldn’t...
Que será, el café of this holy, incorporated place, the wild steam of scorched espresso cakes rising like mirages from the aromatic waste, waving over the coffee-glossed lips of these faces
assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia, of tastes that swirl with the delicacy...
Twice a year Apa cooked his “monk’s half-moon” dish: pumpkin blossom lamb curry—first crackle the fenugreek seeds in ghee, stir the thinly sliced baby pumpkins translucent, add a concocted paste of wild herbs soaked in buttermilk overnight, drop the smoked fatted lamb pieces, pour...
If a jar of jelly is $2.98 & a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4 Then how much bail money will I need when I kill everyone in my house for eating all the bread and jelly in 5 minutes?
I watched Mommy Cook Though I cooked With Grandmother
With Grandmother I learned To pluck chickens Peel carrots Turn chittlins inside out Scrub pig feet
With Mommy I watched leftovers for stew Or vegetable soup Great northern beans Mixed collards turnips and mustard greens Garlic cloves Bay Leaves Very beautifully green Stiff so fresh With just a...
‘þis were a wikkede wey but whoso hadde a gyde þat [myȝte] folwen us ech foot’: þus þis folk hem mened. Quod Perkyn þe Plowman, ‘By Seint Peter of Rome! I haue an half acre to erie by þe heiȝe weye; Hadde I eryed...
Rabbi of condiments, whose breath is a verb, wearing a thin beard and a white robe; you who are pale and small and shaped like a fist, a synagogue, bless our bitterness, transcend the kitchen to sweeten death— our wax in the flame and our seed in the bread.
A suburb of coffee cups; napkins, those crumpled hills; silverware, freeways spotted with grease, with flesh...
and the ash-tray, a ghetto full of charred men with grizzled heads who wasted their flame; where every breath scatters its bones and small gray mounds accumulate, then crumble, like nations or the knees of elephants.
You cannot pronounce my name. “Soor-ya.” Not “soar.” Surya—the sun god. Mom always tells me that a smile heals everything. So I try. I sit beside you in the cafeteria and smile.
You look down at your food and eat your cheeseburger, I eat the lemon rice in my...