Explore Poems: Eating & Drinking

When Sarah Vaughan pipes from the great American songbook,
I forget time is dragging my body from one…

The redolence of rose and new road.
The attar of grass, recently cut.
The fish-whiff of anchovy.
The spinning…

The doctor tells her what she can’t eat
no grains no nuts no beans no sugar a tomato is OK
but no skins…

Under noon’s gaze, eyes narrow search for the prize wether, ensnared by rope and legs bound by azure…

A pound of
Bruised mangoes
Cleaved into halves, chilied and salted like the heads of
Dead fish, which…

1 berry-stained month of summer
1 grandmother
2 cups flour
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½…

Mama is half a country
away and I am newly adult,
so I wash grapes, measuring salt
by eyefuls to baptize…

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...

My husband leans against the counter,
chopping onions, julienning bell peppers,
his back to the door…

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...

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...

Such is their greed that no part is thrown away.
Not crown, not base, not even the eyes
gouged out from the rind by the eye-eaters.
But why do I speak ill of them? I’m no better.
When I throw away the rind my...

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...