Self-Portrait with Umeboshi, poem by Robert Okaji (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

Self-Portrait with Umeboshi
by Robert Okaji

Our resemblance strengthens each day.

Reddened by sun and shiso,
seasoned with salt,

we preside, finding
comfort in failure. Or does
the subjugation of one’s flavor for another’s

define defeat? The bitter, the sour, the sweet
attract and repel

like lovers separated by distances
too subtle to see.
Filling space becomes the end.
What do you learn when you look through the glass?

Knowing my fate, I say fallen. I say earth.

NOTE: Find out more about Umeboshi at wikipedia.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Okaji’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Otoliths, Prime Number Magazine, Clade Song, and Vayavya, among others. He lives in Texas with his wife and two dogs.

You can tell by the way he slices the cantaloupe, poem by D.H. Tracy

You can tell by the way he slices the cantaloupe
by D.H. Tracy

he is harmless, camera’d
in a muffled parliament of cantaloupe-motions.
For every doubt a speech.

He plans to quarter it and quarter the quarters.
The knife first rehearses
a meridian, then the equator,

then mid-cut tilts
and leaves a tatter on one half’s rim.
You can tell he thinks about

what thought is bad at. You can see
that by comparison a chimp would appear,
within its limitations, deft, while the man

with no limitations with respect to principles of melon-slicing
does not. You can tell
he withholds himself from cantaloupe,

as if frightened they will go extinct and take
costs sunk in the skill of slicing them, and further tell
it will be the same next time, him approaching

the fruit as though newly, wondering if it had
a stone in it, or pith and segments,
or required coring, or stank when punctured,

or would show pleasing shapes in section.
He switches grip,
placing his palm over the fat edge of the blade

because a sock puppet has squeaked,
Safety first.
The rinds parted from the sixteenths

are more or less a waste of flesh, according as thrift
argued with intemperance. You can tell
the impending chunks will be publicly homely, not those

of the cruise ship buffet where the night-shift Neopolitan
surpasses himself with flutes and scallops.
You can tell right off a mind unquiet

and at once absent, now remembering
J. at seventeen,
something out of a Kenyan Vermeer,

smiling elfinly as she sliced the cantaloupe.
You could tell by the way she sliced the cantaloupe

the way one slices a cantaloupe would tell a lot.
He draws the knife
along each inside edge to shave the pulp and seedmatter,

varying pressure, speed, and angle of attack
like a deaf man bowing a cello.
Stutters mark the inner faces. He slices

the slices radially into chunks, and varies
the spacing between the cuts from equal angles,
which makes the pieces too big at the center,

to equal volumes, which makes them too long at the poles.
You can tell, as he squeezes a lime-half over the pile
and steps back to admire his freehanded

benighted by-committee cantaloupe-justice,
he cannot be the children’s hockey coach
or run for office, the erratic hexes him, he

circulates sometimes fogged and twitching in his house,
not wishing you could not tell,
exactly, but wanting out.

Source: Poetry (May 2010).

IMAGE: Garden fresh cantaloupe apron, available at zazzle.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: D.H. Tracy‘s poems, essays, reviews, and translations appear widely, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and The Yale Review. He is the author the poetry collection Janet’s Cottage (St. Augustine’s Press, 2012), winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize, available at Amazon.com. He lives in Illinois.

Butter, poem by Elizabeth Alexander

BUTTER
by Elizabeth Alexander

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, but grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, Clifford Alexander Jr. She holds degrees from Yale, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD. Currently the chair of African American Studies at Yale, Alexander is a founding member of Cave Canem, an organization dedicated to promoting African American poets and poetry. Her accomplishments within academia include a Quantrelle Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the University of Chicago and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation. Alexander’s books include American Sublime (2005), shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the 2005 Jackson Poetry Prize. When Barack Obama asked her to compose and read a poem for his Presidential inauguration, her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” became a bestseller after Graywolf Press published it as a chapbook.

Butter, poem by Connie Wanek

BUTTER
by Connie Wanek 

Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet has so many imitators.
I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the décolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!

And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even crème de la crème.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may grace a king’s table.

We have a yellow bowl near the toaster
where summer’s butter grows
soft and sentimental.
We love it better for its weeping,
its nostalgia for buckets and churns
and deep stone wells,
for the press of a wooden butter mold
shaped like a swollen heart.

SOURCE: Poetry (February 2000).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Madison, Wisconsin, poet Connie Wanek grew up on a farm outside Green Bay and in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She was educated at New Mexico State University. Wanek’s poetry collections include Bonfire (1997), winner of the New Voices Award from New Rivers Press, and Hartley Field (2002). Wanek’s honors include the Willow Poetry Prize, the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the Library of Congress. She co-edited, with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro, the anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (2006). She lives with her family in Duluth, Minnesota, where she has worked at the public library and as a restorer of old homes.

PAINTING: “Butter” by Jody Van B. Prints available at etsy.com.

Eggs Rated, poem by Shel Silverstein

EGGS RATED
by Shel Silverstein 

These eggs
Are eggscellent.
I’m not eggsaggerating.
You can tell by my eggspression
They’re eggceptional —
Eggstra fluffy,
Eggstremely tasty,
Cooked eggsactly right
By an eggspert
With lots of eggsperience.
Now I’ll eggsamine the bill….
Ooh — much more eggspensive
Than I eggspected.
I gotta get out of here.
Where’s the eggxit?

SOURCE: “Eggs Rated” appears in Shel Silverstein’s collection Falling Up (HarperCollins, 1996), available at Amazon.com.

Cheese Haiku by Deb Install

CHEESE HAIKI
by Deb Install 

Please give me some cheese
Hard, soft, strong, weak — all are fine
Don’t forget the wine.

Visit the poet’s Twitter page here.

O Cheese, poem by Donald Hall

O CHEESE
By Donald Hall

In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.
O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.
Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Evêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.
O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.
Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.
O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Donald Hall (born 1928) was the first poetry editor of The Paris Review. He served as United States Poet Laureate (2006-2007) and has been the recipient of many award and honors, including Guggenheim Fellowships, designation as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire (198401989), National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry, and the National Medal of Arts (2010).

Leftovers, poem by Jack Prelutsky

LEFTOVERS
by Jack Prelutsky

Thanksgiving has been over
for at least a week or two,
but we’re all still eating turkey,
turkey salad, turkey stew,
 
turkey puffs and turkey pudding,
turkey patties, turkey pies,
turkey bisque and turkey burgers,
turkey fritters, turkey fries.
 
For lunch, our mother made us
turkey slices on a stick,
there’ll be turkey tarts for supper,
all this turkey makes me sick.
 
For tomorrow she’s preparing
turkey dumplings stuffed with peas,
oh I never thought I’d say this —
“Mother! No more turkey… PLEASE!”
***
Find recipe ideas for turkey leftovers at theculinarychase.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: For over 30 years, Jack Prelutsky’s inventive poems have inspired legions of children to fall in love with poetry. His award-winning books include The New Kid On The Block, The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders and If Not For The Cat.  He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Carolynn. Visit him at jackprelutsky.com.

Morning Poem by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

Morning Poem 
by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

###

Find more poems by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser in BRAIDED CREEK: A Conversation in Poetry, available at Amazon.com.

Illustration: Label by Ray Troll for “Wicked Wolf: Raven’s Brew Gourmet Coffee” available at ravensbrew.com.

Bear Poem by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

BEAR POEM
by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

How attentive the big bear resting his chin
on the bird feeder, an eye rolling toward my window
to see if he has permission for sunflower seeds.

…Find more poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser in BRAIDED CREEK: A Conversation in Poetry, available at Amazon.com.

Illustration: “Grin & Bear It” label (by Ray Troll) for Bruin Blend® coffee, available at ravensbrew.com, where the product description is pure poetry…

Bruin Blend®
by Raven’s Brew Coffee®

Decadently luxurious. 
Heavenly syrupy body 
in a laid-back orchestration 
of pleasant earthy, 
herbal and warm-spice flavor notes 
creates a pool of deep ponderance 
for your palate.