Ordering Info.
How To Eat the Artichoke | Full Cooler | Sunday Was | Celeriac
How To Eat the Artichoke
I.
If you gouge,
your unstrategic teeth
cannot penetrate it. Your palate
will reel
like a wronged lover from
the fibrous green;
so you take it
in your hands and pry
edge by edge,
scrape and suck and lodge
the platinum paste
behind the crenellations of your teeth,
and finger open the prickly layers
and flay closer,
toward the core,
toward evening,
opening
inward.
II.
…the next minute, the battlement
after that—caution:
scalding oil,
hot ice blossom
of garlic
floating in lemon water, a cluster
stripped past delicacy
down to the purple
choke, senses entering into
thistled mystery, dark green-brown
blood-consciousness
like everything once manifest
in the market (excitement in
the hearts of all the market vegetables,
vegetable-darkness),
artichoke, inner sanctum
sanctorum that was more than
the wind through the thorns,
than lemon, more
than love was
no history, no moment, no offering
but parting
in a green night,
copper crumbs,
burnt stars,
asterisks
smoke-black pepper.
III.
Let the heart taste loiter
in the bright climb from oblivion,
from the skeletal remnants—
all this junk,
this twitching crackle of dirt, of light.
(Previously appeared in: New Delta Review)
Full Cooler
Six-O-Clock
moon doubled like a fish-
hook in the corner of my car
window by the Long Island
Sound.
Above,
clouds on the horizon
frozen like schools
of mackerel in a faded scuba-
diver’s snap-
shot. Leafless
spaces blink beyond
faint boats, fog
horns, and the whistle
on the roof of the biscuit
factory flickering
inland. Scratches
on the side-
view mirror cross-
hatch the bleary
lunar rim: glint
of fish
bones on a dim-
lit plate.
(Previously appeared in: Barrow Street)
Sunday Was
still Saturday-night-hungered, so filled
with want, holding out
the morning’s hope of more
than glassy marmalade on toast, more
than sunlight (sparks in your eyes),
than even the green freedom of a cockatoo
edging the moon from its peppered nest
through frost-shattered branches:
salt, egg, hot and orange, moltenly
surpassing the indulgence
of hiding snow-obscured in a robe much later
into the day, counterbalancing the bitter promise
of bottomed-out coffee—and dreamlike, but more
awake, steamier, but more like cream
draping the velvety brown lace: butter dribbling
off the French toast, as alive
to the taste of change
as ice on a hot stove
riding on its own melting.
(Previously appeared in: SLAB: Sound & Literary Art Book)
Celeriac
Artery-twisted
on the outside,
the torn, blood-draggled glove
of a poor ogre’s heart,
the most pointlessly
neglected vegetable.
Bathe this knotted beauty, ancestor
of the ancient ways of the earth.
Slip the clots of dirt
from this tangle of hairy tubules that fed
green stalks in the rain.
It labored all year to grow,
got shovel-cut,
hardened
into the clenched face
of a fist, as if defying Dante with its uncried
cry, hunched so long by dust-drunken bulbs
in the cellar, unable to recall
the sun’s heat on flesh.
When this black thing emerged, sky-
pierced, in the winter
market, the earth still refused to burn,
having turned
to stone, like the white meat of this root,
all its assertive, refreshing flavor
hidden in a monster heart.
(Previously appeared in: The Summerset Review)