your gaze has gone straight through me like a vampire’s flashing fangs through a blue throbbing vein embossed on a bare slanted neck slick with sweat & I am already waiting feverishly in love’s unventilated vestibule for the moment of transformation the full moon night of losing myself in you that will rend me apart terrorising me with its blend of weakness and strength ecstasy & escalation of pain the senses grow suddenly sharper now I can hear your heart …
Tag: Garlic
“Cooked Under Pressure” & Other Poems * Joan Mazza
Cooked Under Pressure My mother loved her pressure cooker and gave testimony as if in a commercial: Preserves vitamins, fast cooking! Energy efficient! Sterilizes your food! Even quick-cooking vegetables like spinach, escarole, and broccoli went under the power of pressure, set the valve jiggling as if it might explode at any second. My father arrived as Mother served the meal. He washed his hands and ate in silence, while pressure built in that small dinette. We knew he could blow …
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“WANTING” * Fiction * Mike Lewis-Beck
Hilda has it all. She’s 42, mother of bubbly two-year-old Todd, and a professor of intellectual property law, where she has just made a bundle—her share in an inheritance suit deploying ‘The Eustace Diamond Defense’—which persuaded the judge to allow Mrs. Mandolini to keep the family diamonds her late husband, olive oil magnate Giuseppe Mandolini, had lavished upon her. Besides these personal and professional triumphs, she has just won a weight-lifting trophy at her fitness club, for executing a 190-pound …
“Yellow” * Prose Poem * Y. C. Lin
i. My mother knocks it against the counter and splits it cleanly in half. Yellow yolk slides smoothly into porcelain. She whisks the mixture, tilting the bowl. This way more air goes in, she shows me, arm moving swiftly back and forth. Yellow spills into the clear. The fork clacks rhythmically against the bowl while the oil in the pan sizzles on the stove. There is the loud, incessant noise of the ventilation hood, the rising smoke, the hazy heat, …
“Italian Sunday” * Poetry * Diane Kane
Sunday morning quiet Open cans of tomato Puree, chopped, and paste. Only Contadina will do. Garlic, oregano, palm Full of sugar. Mix, check Flame, place cover askew. Remove ground Hamburg From brown paper wrapper. Room temperature Tan eggs in yellow bowl On Formica table. Time to go to the garden. Snap rubbers over black Shiny shoes. Walk through Dew to where the Green parsley grows. Pinch willowy shoots between Fingernail and thumb. Inhale. Return with bounty Steam drips from …
“Sheltering” & “Learning to Eat a Mango” * Poetry * Katherine Szpekman
Sheltering In her lust to comfort, she melts chocolate, stirs the swirling velvet in hot butter. These days are long. Why not write a sonnet to brownies; she hears the glossy sputter. Beats two eggs and sugar, pale and frothy, sifts flour, salt and soda like fine sand. Combines all; the batter smooth and sticky. Licks the luscious darkness, upon her hands. Bakes at 350 for half an hour. The fragrance is maddening, but must cool. Patience, in the memory …
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Two Poems of Scented Place by Frances Daggar Roberts
En Auvergne We stooped to cross the threshold carrying evening on our shoulders and shadow curved the corners and the walls around a muted light. A simmering dark sauce breathed out a lure of something richly meat. We took our seats along a wooden bench quietly close as frogmouths. Knitted into family there we watched the sorcery of our hostess as she sliced the orange folds of mushroom into her steaming brew. A scatter of herbs unlike the ones we …
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