Explore Poems: Eating & Drinking

I feel god in this Taco Bell tonight:
Cheese, beans, rice, the witching hour

of missing someone. My mother
liked to cook with the worst kind of flour.

My father snuck sips of sweating drinks
clutched in my sister’s little fingers. This

is the spot to...

...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...

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic

and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and you go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only...

Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer—
God, let me keep what I love.

Peaches, cheap. Books, brilliant—
mine so I can underline.

How aromatic the apricots,
how sharp the novels.

Together,
we have planted an orchard.

I don’t understand the word defensive:
are you supposed...

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?
 
Black Momma Math
If Black Momma...

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...

1

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.


2

Like a...

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.

Now, my parents...

1.
three shades of blue
evoke minnie's can do,
soo chow's, yori wada

2.
jimbo's bop city,
john lee's boom boom room,
history riffing vlue matzoh balls,
fried chicken, soba

3.
the jigoku club inside
j town, bold rebels jamming
cross from black town, udon,
grits, barbecue

4.
cherry blossoms vlooming
in lady day's hair, greens...

Here is how often you see donuts in kid-jail: never. Zero
times. Like seeing a cat or a dog, a cell phone. A white
kid, a comfy chair. Just me and this one kid, same kid
who wrote Monkey Rescue first time we...

melon

Melon is hard on the outside
Tender on the inside
She has a magnificent personality
So they bred her with an invasive species
Now, she is seedless and childless
Has become uncouth and jokey
She will die on the vine
___


cherry

Her grandmother says Cherry is sweet and...

Months later, my father and I
discovered his mother’s last word—
deep in the downstairs freezer,
one loaf of dark rye.

Its thaw slowed the hours.

I could not bear
the thought of eating it.
Then the ice subsided. The bread
was firm, fragrant, forgiving.

My father got the...

funny     that little yoke
sunny side up
in the span of  the lake

every morning for breakfast
bubbles up    what—

great hen lays this egg
on us.

onus    now that’s funny
this burden of  respect.

what shining
flight or light are we to prove
our ancestry with   ...

The rice plant drinks up arsenic,
so show good sense and change your diet.

Studies reveal, where fields were cotton
(Southern states), more contamination.

If   your word for food is your word for rice,
change your word for food, or rice.

Deem it a side dish;...

The Artichoke

She bore only the heart,
Worked at the stem with her
Fingers, pulling it to her,
And into her, like a cord.

She would sustain him,
Would cover his heart.
The hairy needles
And the bigger leaves,

These she licked into shape,
Tipping each with its point.
He is...

The plump lemon,
the spoon's metal
cuts off the shadow,
 
the bursting overflow of pleasure,
the dark night of the shriek,
a nameless fire in the street,
some blackened breadcrumbs...

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Oh, that Thou teach even me. I who abhor truth, the stubborn bloodhound. Worth three hairbrushes, if that. No: hydrogenated fats. No: enhanced form- aldehyde. What shorthand thunderbolt could halt my hibernation & dog thirsts? The unabridged refrigerator, the unnoted...