Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Nineteen
Spring 2009
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Contact Us |
 
Creative Cookery for Gracious Living: A Lesson in 4 Courses
Susan Slaviero

Your job in this new world of fabulous eating is to make the best foods attractive and to create
in the family a desire for a healthy balance of varied and nutritious fare.

                                 --From The Pillsbury Family Cookbook, c. 1963


i.         appetizers and other titillations

Unshell him with glazed, salted
almonds, garlic-toasted cashews.
Butterstich the hollows
of stuffed shrimp with parsley stems
to suggest a verdant spine, a plush
leaf. Tease his eye. Like this. Obscure
lingering notes
of brackish water, iodine.

ii.         the meat monologues

O meat, O pan, O loaf! Fleshly
apparitions, layers of seasoned beef
and bread stuffing, shellacked
with Heinz 57 sauce and honey.
The whiskey mingle of steak,
marinade, a woman’s
reddened hands.

iii.         oh, the salad days

Practice variety in your knifework—
cluster balls & spears,
cubes and sections. A ruffle
of romaine, a shaft
of celery. Rarify the wombs
of hollow melons
with frosted grapes and grenadine.

iv.         a cakework orange

Chocolate lush, lemon moon,
the murmur of pudding basins,
rasp of biscotti against your
teeth. Try the pears
helene in syrup. Here, here.
Wilting like torten on the tongue.

About Susan Slaviero

| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Contact Us |