You will vanish

On Leaving the Bachelorette Brunch
Rachel Wetzsteon

Because I gazed out the window at birds
doing backflips when the subject turned
to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over
with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear,

never let it be said that I’d rather be
firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards
or in a cave composing polyglot puns.
I crave, I long for transforming love

as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread.
But I also fear the colder changes
that lie in wait and threaten to turn moons of honey
to pools of molasses, broad front porches to narrow back gardens

and tight wings of friendship to flimsy things that break
when a gold band brightly implies, “leave early go home,
become one with the one the world has told you to
tend and treasure above all others.”

You love and that’s good.
You are loved and that’s superb.
You will vanish and reap some happy rewards.
But look at the birds.

Mike’s

plus bonus cereal flow chart

Stop eating our shows!

show zombie courtesy of rollerfink

Just to eat

Rice
Mary Oliver

It grew in the black mud.
It grew under the tiger’s orange paws.
Its stems thinner than candles, and as straight.
Its leaves like the feathers of egrets, but green.
The grains cresting, wanting to burst.
Oh, blood of the tiger.

I don’t want you just to sit down at the table.
I don’t want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a
     blessing.

Comfortable

Pete Jones’s Canadian Bacon Pizza
Cami Park

1 12-inch unbaked pizza crust
1 cup pizza sauce
2/3 cup mozzarella cheese
6 oz chopped Canadian bacon
1/2 cup thinly sliced mushrooms
1 small green or red bell pepper, seeded and sliced
1/2 tsp crushed dried oregano
1/2 tsp crushed dried basil
crushed red pepper flakes

Get off the couch. Shuffle into the kitchen. Read note on refrigerator, and gather together pizza crust, pizza sauce, hunk of mozzarella cheese, package of Canadian bacon, pint of mushrooms, and oregano, basil, and red pepper flakes. Take forever to find the damn pepper. Wonder if a yellow one would have been okay too.

Read recipe again. Pick up cheese and put it down again. Read package of Canadian bacon. Try to figure out how to get 6 oz from the 10 oz package. Open it up and eat some. Sigh heavily. Poke at the mushrooms. They look dirty. Pick up the damn pepper and turn it over and over again in your hand. What the hell is seeded?

Stare dumbly at it all for a moment. Call Domino’s.

Prep time: 1 hour. Feeds Pete.

previously published in Forklift, Ohio

Such divisions of promise

All Particular Wishes

Discussing the weather,
we were careful to be inexact
in the smallest particulars.

Carefully, too, we packed
in newspaper the fragile
mountains I had decided
to take with me– Kawa Karpo,
Cerro Toro, Kailash,
exquisite Fuji, Mount Meru–

Except that’s impossible. We
couldn’t have done that. Mountains
are so big, and there is not enough
newspaper in the world. Really,
what I want to say is, such divisions of
promise are preposterous, you might as
well peel the bark off the trees or
tear the bricks from the house, you will
still be hungry, you will not be full.

Which I know because I know someone who did that once.

by Cami Park

I will make these for you

Chocolate Chip, Oats 'n' Caramel Cookie Squares

I think the oats make them healthy.

Make me new

My heart is an erratic, unbeautiful thing.

Things to do on a plinth

I would French braid my hair on a plinth.

I would eat a bologna sandwich on a plinth. No, egg salad, because I just remembered,
I’m a vegetarian now.

I would perfect my Humphrey Bogart impression on a plinth.

I would race turtles on a plinth.

I would invent the super-anivated penambulator on a plinth. You will know it when you see it.

I will love the plinth. The plinth will admire my body.

I would lie on my back on a plinth, hands down on the concrete.

Spit marbles into the sky.

Trust someone.

I am I am I own

I am a beautiful flower

Hermann Forsterling

I am an ostrich

Keith Carter

I own the ostrich