Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-three Summer 2010 |
| Issue Twenty-three, Summer 2010 | |
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Eat Lobster & Be Healthy! But Order It Here First! Top Five Dishes + an Aquarium Minna’s favorite boys dined again after midnight on a feast of fried oysters, Welsh rarebit, deviled crabs, lobster, caviar—unadorned save for a dash of lemon juice—and scrambled eggs with bacon. For special occasion—a courtesan’s engagement, a birthday, the reappearance of a long lost Everleigh Club client—Minna ordered the team of chefs to double the usual menu. The madam believed any event that diverted the course of a normal day was a valid excuse to host an epicurean free-for-all. —From Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott The Arsenic Lobster 2010 Anthology (an epicurean free-for-all) is NOW available and just a click away. Thanks to PayPal, it is even easier to get your fill: http://arseniclobster.magere.com/archive/order/index.html. Congratulations & thanks to all who contributed. Thanks to my wonderful, all volunteer staff: Lissa Kiernan, Katherine Blackbird, Clarissa Jackobsons & George Pichowsky! Without whom the ArsenLob could not thrive. A GREAT Arsenic Welcome to guest editor Lillian-Yvonne Bertram who has been helping catch up with our summer submission reading! May gorgeous crustaceans fall from the sky and onto your laps! The Summer Menu Order Boiled or Steamed Lobster when you want whole lobster and not just a sample. We have a fine selection of poems from Steve Davenport which will easily fill your plate with steel rods, mesh, gunite, and asphalt. And for desert a helping of dirt she can light. Here is thin hot peel. Here skin, paradise. This is a dish not to be missed! Matt Bullen offers up a side of burning-glass ants, burnt matches and a persistent star. May you eat too much, sleep on it and just pretend to have bad dreams. Dana Guthrie Martin’s poems satisfy those who make meals from appetizers. If I tossed out my Velveeta, I would finally be nacho-free. As it is, I crunch on the hard edges of corn chips. Left to myself I can only say “melt me” and slide my tongue inside the olives. Left to myself I could have any nachos I want so long as they are fresh and let me take them without pretense. You will enjoy these large helpings of delectable Arsenic Lobster. Order Lobster Bisque when you want to indulge. In selections from her haunting and gorgeously long poem, Remembering Three Walled Cemeteries, Debby Blank whispers of electricity. One may gorge on radishes black as spiders, Crushed skulls in the dirt—Shells in starlight. Be forewarned: A mouse guards the kitchen door. Garnish with the eerie, arsenic herbs of Juliet Cook’s Fall (I) and Fall (II) and you will find a tiny dried apple for a ghost horse. Add a glass of rosewater to satiate all your senses. Order a Lobster Roll when you need comfort food. Nothing is more comforting than the joy of country being born. A belief that beginnings made everything possible, like light in a mother’s womb. In her poem, Birthday, Lois P. Jones provides for your longings with sparklers and firecrackers. |
Richard Hedderman tempts you with naked lovers, their fists in each other's hair; a naturalist with sheepdog and scythe; some armaments and a drum only to give you a favorite dream where there’s no fountain or orchard in sight, no sheaf of barley. This is a dream where one might find comfort in a cemetery. Other guests have selected items like this DietRight Bathroom Scale, but not Emilie Lindemann. Her reassuring poem, This is Not Your Grandmother’s Registry reminds that five pounds of cheeseburgers are softer than Simply Vera Wang towels in plum. Order Surf and Turf when you want to pair two perfect foods. I recommend Judith Skillman’s Plums and My Penance. You will enjoy a waterfall of plums in the language of ripped seams. Another perfect pairing is Sonya Feher’s Want with Kim Noriega’s Sacrifice. Where else will you be able to savor the want of a fresh pot of basil in each hand with the juicy sacrifice of brother to sister; lover to lover? Order Lobster Taquitos when you’re ready to take your crustacean to a new level. Sarah Glass pours an ambrosial light only butterflies can see. Here, her poem indulges readers seeking a way for suffering to end. c.a. leibow fills your thoughts, your mouth with the taste of rust and sex. Be sure to wrap up your evening with this fresh catch—the last locomotive plaintively pulling away. Lobster on the rocks! Admire the Lobster Tank when you’re not into eating sea bugs. Simply enjoy dipping into our hand-picked selections from Mark Seidl’s in-the-swim sequence of aquarium poems. They’re even hotter than the radioactive fish fining in the Connecticut River and bigger than those jumping carp in Illinois. I tremble / With the thought of it, twist sideways / To stroke it with my rippling anal fin. And since Strontium-90 collects almost exclusively in fish bones, if you must eat them, be careful not to let your tiny horny teeth gnaw / Its fins and tail to bone lest you become /Skeletons, too, but without weapons or / Head gear. No matter how you enjoy your arsenic, you will find the hottest selections from summer here! --- Susan Yount Editor & Publisher, Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal |
