All posts tagged: Poetry

Pie

By RICK BAROT

I took a class on how to make pie. When one desires tender fruit, a structured crust, gold at the edges, there is no ease. The teacher wore a black apron, serious as the stone inside the fruit. We stood around an industrial table, each with a bowl. Flour, yolk, shortening, sugar. Outside was summer. The oven hummed. What was called for was a teaspoon of salt. Now remove a pinch for the ocean beyond the window, its humid air. Now remove a pinch for what sweats from the fingers in the long kneading. You are always hungry. I’m your blue ribbon. I’m your huckleberry.

     

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Pie
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Aqueduct

By MARY JO SALTER

All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.

Aqueduct
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Cedar Park Café 

By TERRA OLIVEIRA

at cedar park café, praised for their chicken & waffles, 
i sit at the corner table, & a young blonde child 
with their family in front of me takes a sip of water, 
looks right at their parents, raises their right hand, 
back straight: i commit to not look at my phone, 
even when it’s right in front of me. 

i make the same commitment to myself every day. 
before recovery, no amount of self-control could bring myself 
to stop it. i was sort of big but the phone was bigger. 
this compulsion is real & serious—i thought it, i knew it, 
i’d pray for my behavior to change the next day. 
first thing the next morning, my hand would up 
& move itself, no thought of the rest of the body.  

like any addict there is hope for us too. 
in recovery—yes—i turn to meetings, 
turn to phone calls, to God & to fellows, 
& to readings. i pick up, i slip, i try again, 
further away from where i was (the hours & days), 
& closer to where i want to be 
(so many more hours, so many more days). 

my chicken & waffles are served, 
melted butter & maple syrup & crispy chicken 
& warm sweet & spicy sauce. 
i put my phone (just a notebook) back down.  

the parent: put your phone away. 
the child: we’re going to have to put it in the fire of death. 
the parent: the phone? 
the child: yes, in the fire of death. 
the parent: we don’t need to put it in a fire of death. 
and the phone: 

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Terra Oliveira is a writer and visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. During the week, you can find her managing two bookstores in the North Bay.

Cedar Park Café 
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Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain

By BERTRAND LAVERDURE
Translated by SLP

Poems appear below in English and the original French.

Translator’s note

I stumbled on these poems, fairly literally, in a bookstore in Québec.

I immediately recognized the hyper-connected world M. Bertrand Laverdure writes of—the new networks of pop culture and politicians and internet also familiar to me as an American, and the older networks of gargantuan trees, shaky trees, trees above streams and children playing and park benches and promotional flyers and guidewires. I recognized the surreality of his world. Of the double-address, where each poem is an epistle both to a specific tree with a clear local history, and to figures from cartoons (Skeletor), film (Poltergeist), myth (Penelope), classic literature (Gatsby), and more. The surreality where each tree and literary figure is also “a jpeg,” and where plugging devices into outlets, or each other, mirrors trees (the French word for plugged in is “branché”).

Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain
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