Assonance Poem
This is how the slow row residue colors hours;
No one owns the coin dropping on a loop,
Nor the dour squire nursing beer—
An afternoon bar acquires ailments one by one.
Alliteration Poem
The laurels wilted watching the water,
Lording their leaves, looming tumescent, laden tendrils drooping.
The swooping, the shooting of a whippoorwill watching the water,
Done wading the weeks, now writhing the warm stems, ladling blood for a bower birth and lending low cries for the farm.
Acrostic Poem
Held by a field of bones.
Often without cause.
New shoes, green glass bottles.
Everything becomes a graveyard.
You fall; the ground warms.
Abstract Poem
gold as the goliath, strapping as the snail, push
down the riverbend, head meets nail, nil the serpent tongue,
witch the washrag, we live in this cabin here, look the rang river,
the egg nest, stole from the happenstance of estuary. ashes rush to compress it,
hold the hilt that stung what brought this pestilence. hang the song that buried the trees.
Filed under: Poetry
Two years ago, I started to feel that my poetry writing was in a rut. So I made up a challenging exercise for myself, the 75 Poem Project, in which I would endeavor to write one poem representing 75 different traditional forms. I got all the way up to Elegy before moving to LA. And then I completely stopped writing poetry. Something about the stress of moving to a new city with no car, job, apartment, or friends and then spending the subsequent 15 months making those things appear out of thin air knocked all the creative energy out of me. But no more excuses. I am picking up where I left off. I won’t post every example–to be honest, a lot of traditional poetic forms are dead for a reason. But I will make a valiant effort to put them out into the world and not keep them hidden on my computer, where most things I make seem to live.
Filed under: 1
Collaborative Poem
written in collaboration with Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Taken on the chin, every face is a shadow of living.
Age strikes the knowing.
Even in the morning of my 26th year,
I glimpse something of it and nod, acknowledging
the swallowed jugular of my grandmother.
I will row for years on the midwinter
pond, flocking the loons with scattered bread.
A marriage that begins without harm will dart
and leave two split halves grasping
along the shoreline, reeling in lines
left afloat too long.
And a friend from school drops cold
on a grizzled bus.
If love carries me past
middle age, my husband
will die in the garden, green clippings
poisoning his under-cuticles.
New men will come and go.
All go.
The bearded sailor
who announces dawn with a trumpet made of fingers.
The whippet preacher,
young to our wisdom,
sings praises to the motel cross.
Another bosom friend
turns to money, lemonade and investments pollute
thirty years.
Let us go to sleep under a noon sun
and agree that it is
wet and quiet losing everything.
Filed under: Food Writing
I consider myself an adventurous eater and it’s very rare that I encounter something that I find inedible, but I met my match last weekend at Hurry Curry. It wasn’t inedible in the sense that it was bad, per se. It was just….odd.
What did I eat? The famed chicken pasta at Hurry Curry of Tokyo. The ingredients? Pasta, fried chicken, onions, and some kind of tangy sauce rather like a marriage of tahini and honey mustard. To be fair, I was warned that the combination would be a bit jarring and I’d read about the dish online, but I really wasn’t prepared.
The pasta was perfectly cooked and the fried chicken had a flavorful crust but it was the sauce that lost me. On the one hand, it did provide a nice creamy counterpoint that could have tied it all together had it not tasted exactly like the chicken tender dipping sauce at my childhood all-night diner. I couldn’t get past it. I still can’t tell if it was the memory that ruined it for me or if the chicken pasta was truly weird. Not that it matters. I can cross this one off the Must Try List and move along to brighter options.
Filed under: Food Writing
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It’s been oddly cold in LA lately and I’ve been having a nonstop French Onion Soup craving for about three weeks. Now, I can’t eat tremendous amounts of dairy so I’ve had to space these indulgences out like a carefully orchestrated march into foreign territory.
The first craving hit hard and I didn’t have time to research, so I went to the closest purveyor of FOS to my house, Figaro Bistrot. The thing about Figaro is that the decor is perfect. It’s all sconces and rose-colored imitation Tiffany glass. Zinc bar. Fresh macrons. It is the kind of place that makes having a moody bowl of hot and cheesy soup sound like the most romantic solo date possible. I was perfectly primed to have a Dining Experience, especially when a waiter brought me a pillow to sit on so my height (or lack thereof) wouldn’t leave me looking like an alcoholic 5-year-old, downing Chimays while waiting for her order. The lighting was perfect, the people were beautiful, the soup was underwhelming.
Maybe I’m a bit oldschool, but when I want French Onion Soup, I’m thinking beef stock, butter, onions, bread, and gruyere. I do not want stewed tomato chunks and celery, both of which I fished out of my Figaro broth, holding up to the candlelight to make sure my palate wasn’t imagining things. Needless to say, this soup experience left me totally unsatisfied and two days later, I found myself pining away for some more dangerous elixir.
Riverside Cafe in Burbank is not quite a hole in the wall, but it’s damn close. The tables are covered in sticky 80s oilcloth, the menus are crushed, and the outdoor bathroom is not much different than something you’d find at a Mobil station. But the food is home cooked heaven. They have a baked potato menu for God’s sake. Their French Onion Soup is divine, cooked-to-order. The crocks arrive at the table accompanied by a warning, DO NOT TOUCH THEM. Indeed, they are ingenious miniature ovens, keeping the cheese perfectly melty throughout the meal. With no extraneous vegetables in sight, Riverside’s take on this classic was simply perfect and enough to sate my appetite. For this week at least.
Filed under: Food Writing
Let’s be clear—I love Los Angeles and its incredible mix of fancy pants dining establishments, greasy burger joints, and ethnic outposts full of exciting new treats. But I’ve been finding something lacking even in my favorite spots. Namely, the experiences never feel like mine. Maybe that makes sense for a city of roughly 9,878,554 people and it’s too much to ask for a really intimate meal that makes you feel utterly at home in the City of Angels.
But then I discovered Wood Spoon and this gripe had to be removed from the list. Simply put, Wood Spoon, a tiny Brazilian café located in a spare, comfortable storefront downtown, is the answer to many of my culinary prayers. There you can look into the quasi-open kitchen and observe Natalia, the owner, zipping between industrial stoves and the refrigerator actually singing to herself. A happy cook is a good sign for any meal and the food she prepares is certainly worthy of song.
Potpies cooked to a golden crisp reveal a meaty inside full of shredded, tender chicken, hearts of palm, fava beans, and green olives. The coxhina are soft and flavorful and not too greasy. And the homemade truffles….oh the homemade truffles. They are dusted with cocoa powder and beyond rich. Even the water is amazing—infused with piles of cinnamon sticks, raw sugar cane, or refreshing orange peel.
Most people associate Brazilian cuisine with the costumed pomp and circumstance of the meat orgy occurring at Fogo de Chãos across the country. But the food at Wood Spoon transcends traditional recipes transplanted and made cliché with nostalgia—it tastes joyfully alive.
Wood Spoon
107 W 9th St
Los Angeles, CA 90015
(213) 629-1765
Filed under: Food Writing
I am terrified of cooking. And yet, I have one of the most well-stocked kitchens of anyone I know. This includes those of a gourmet baker and a former sous-chef. Sea-salt from Provence? Check. Red enameled Dutch oven? Check. Citrus reamer? Check. What is a citrus reamer? I have no idea. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Some people feel rich when they buy a pair of designer shoes. Or drive an expensive, hard-to-import car. I feel the most wealthy when I spend an afternoon comparing the merits of microplanes at a Sur la Table. I get this close to the promise that one day, I will wake up and intuitively know how to make a coq au vin perfectly. Instead, I settle for a silicone oven mitt and throw it in the backseat on my way to grab some takeout.
My fear of cooking started young. My parents weren’t very handy in the kitchen. My father made dry chicken, an underdone baked potato, and limp, flavorless broccoli once a week. My mother attempted to broaden our horizons with a series of epically bad meals, one of which included a ceramic dish full of eviscerated bread, white wine, and raw shrimp. The recipe she was following, culled from God knows what salmonella cookbook, promised great results and in a bowl of half cooked crustaceans drowning in a lukewarm bath of swill.
It is unsurprising then that the only food I would enthusiastically eat until the age of 15 was buttered spaghetti.
Like most things that you aren’t permitted in your childhood, food became a kind of dream for me. But not the attainable kind. Hence the minestrone where I cooked the noodles along with the soup, inadvertently inventing a kind of semolina sponge that absorbed all of the liquid until the pot was a solid mass of starch and tomato residue.
Restaurants are what make me happy. I love the intricate process of becoming a regular. I look forward to the moment where a waiter will stop bringing me the menu and just arrive at my table with a mild papaya salad and deep fried tofu. Even as a waitress, I never got sick of being surrounded by edibles. I looked forward to the moment when one of my customers would say, “What do you recommend this evening?”
And yet, when I’m feeling down, nothing makes me feel better than cracking open a cookbook and assembling my collection of very fine tools and beautiful ingredients. The worry doesn’t kick in until I’ve turned on the gas and realized that my stove mimics the slope of the floor, sending all of the cooking oil to the far left of the pan, leaving the ingredients stranded on the right with no protective coating. Or that it will be impossible to successfully coordinate the seared chicken and mushroom stir fry without seriously neglecting one of them. And that risotto is a pipe dream invented by women with kankles who were raised chained to a stove.
I feel like I can identify this as an addiction because no matter how badly I screw up, I’m back for more a week later, seemingly having learned nothing about my inability to properly braise a chicken.
