Lou Bank is a Brooklyn based photographer and zine-maker. They shoot people, balloons and leftover food. They think of their work as studying mundane absurdities. When they’re not creating you can find them climbing neon-colored plastic rocks and trying really hard not to kill all their plants.
website: loufbank.com
follow them: @lou.bank
Featured image via PublicDomainPictures.net
There was a time
when I ate everything
that time I h(ate)d everything
about me
I’d talk about cheese
in therapy
fill my food diaries
with lies
they were pretty
that way
I didn’t want to
work through my issues
with cheese
but at that time
there was no other way
than to map my day
around cheese
you see,
when cheese
is decidedly
the frontrunner
and coming with you
to an island
it warrants a conversation
I didn’t want
cheese
so delicious
and comforting
to be my arch enemy
in fact
I craved to
look at it lovingly
and not always think
it was trying
to take me down
Leah Iannone is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for February 2018.
Leah Iannone received her MFA from The New School’s Creative Writing Program. She currently works as a director of academic planning. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, 12th Street, The Best American Poetry Blog, Alimentum, Redheaded Stepchild, PAX Americana, Barrow Street, Psychic Meatloaf, and The Inquisitive Eater.
Featured image via Pxhere.
The sartorial is, in civilization, erotic but redeemed in the reframing of dressing as more vinaigrette than concealing : this is consolation for the feminine made terrestrial. The tailor is the tool of both vanity and the flesh, like the low scream in the jungle is for both music and mating.
To clothe oneself is colloquial, otherwise it fails. That is the difference between clothed and covered.
Here the fabric, implications of sheer, are animated only by a linguistic rooted in the tongue, root of our temperatures. This is what we talk about when we talk about clothes. To fashion suggests form, the body you find readymade and yet you wish to make it : not just here but anywhere. Do I look better in my glasses, after all? After rereading Darwin? Have my objects overtaken me? Or do our adornments, specific as they are with human geometries, multiply the godgiven like buttons teem with fingers, zippers too. And a neck, no matter the vernacular, is in performance against “skin and bones.”
To eat, in civilization, is hardly necessary. Survival is ornament to fashion, that is how advertising works.
Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.
Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.
Featured image via Pixabay.
fatty cloud sunkissed
yellow juice orangutanging
acid tang tongue listed
catalogue kissing nude papers
stomp on sir if dancing
tamp on right on a pen
is who had to die so
i could be so pure
breakfast and broken slow slaw
yolk spread and oxen
heaving with hoes wore
blues in the stead of my room
that paraphernalia peripheral
of decision discarded gloves
pidgeon’s doved dirtied and white
a glass of milk unmothered
staying for breakfast remains
boned dance afterpartied post-whorled
way the world ends she said
i’ll bang if you’ll whimper
Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.
Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.
Featured image via Max Pixel.
with hurt feelings,
and good intentions.
i feast off my sins,
and fast for your forgiveness.
i needed him at lunch but
i wanted you for dinner.
Born and raised in Amityville, NY (yes, that Amityville), Shaniece Devieux has been writing poetry since her first school-supply-list-required composition notebook. She received her BA in English Arts from Hampton University and is now attending The New School for her MFA in Creative Writing. When she isn’t spending her evenings in the West Village, she works as a TA for the cutest kindergarten class in all of Long Island. She hopes to one day write a book, own a Malibu Beach house, and be featured on a Beyoncé album in no particular order.
Featured image: “A woman is being admired by two men, one of whom is taking a closer look through a quizzing glass” an engraving after Domenico Maggiotto.
Come to terms with the materiality of tongues of all persuasions.
Lover : she may say to you,
in the chill of greengrey evenings, dismal with ugly clouds,
that cups of hot water will be sufficient to pacify you.
Whisper to her, “Usually. But I am too accustomed to
keeping the company of unhappy women.”
Beards and grains of wood swirl mystically
—when hauntings appear in their chains and jewels reeking of ozone
you must sit down, eat, and discuss new ways of living without god.
It is not autumn all the time, though goodbying.
You lay your leopard carpets, leopard carpets with the faces
of dead Habsburgs in their spots. Sit. Stay a while.
Whisper, “I have been collecting iller and iller fitting pants.”
First kisses! Remember. Hormonal feints.
“Puberty : it’s a helluva drug!” Be careful.
Krazy Kat Goes A-wooing is playing on the old TV.
“Something dead,” in a midnight thought you think—
“Something dead should not be, if it must be dead,
so soon dead.” Sea salt. And lemon. And parsley.
Is this it? Your whispers—can you speak?
Whispers : “I’ve been trying to find the right diet
to make my sweat sweet-smelling.” Oysters. Though expensive.
But the garden : it is filling with babies. And. “One must
make oneself feel classy, mustn’t one?”
Oysters go with no wine at all.
Waves. Waves. Unhappy women : the aphrodisiac
is that bitterness remains edible. A whisper in return,
“Hold old are we? I’m shy about my age? Shy about the paleness
of my lips? Why can’t you be shy about… this… ritual?”
And what does our oyster say?
“Touch. I have a beard because I am wise. I have died
so others may live.” We all begin to laugh or rather to tickle.
Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.
Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.
Featured image: “Sandra Bruno Straightens a Pillow in the Immaculate Living Room of Her Family’s Home at 39 Neptune Road” from The U.S. National Archives
“BODY: If we knew how our body is made,
we wouldn’t dare move.”
—Flaubert
We’ll combust. Faintness creeps like a pang
an ingrown toenail—drift: my tummy… And you
standing still, staring at produce like a thigh. Grumbling,
our burn—sweating at cornucopia, hot river gods—
peanut butter’s goo and nut meat, warm:
texture of the womb—pastas well cooked
given under unwise teeth, pleasing—iced cream,
salt on pretzels, slight burn, throat’s dumbshow
its physicality—consumption, a lunged gulp.
Hunger at the hardness of a fresh pepper, red and
like you. Meat’s sponge and animal dung appeal:
also warmth, organ meat’s scented faint piss—
animals, burned to our burn: chewing and alive…
Like all gluttony it is only the indirect flare of desire
to have the world reduced to a few monumental objects:
a mountain, a bowl of beans, a truck, you my dear, and my mouth.
Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.
Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.
Featured image: “The Couple,” by Karl Kasten.
With a thermometer plunged
into one orifice or another, a body
should register an internal
temperature of 98.6, more or less,
which begs a question of cannibals:
what’s the accepted safe minimum?
Poultry is reliably done at 170, pork
somewhat less. Beef and lamb, well,
there’s rare or well done. And what
about preparation: spiced and minced?
marinated or brined? Don’t forget
presentation – plattering matters.
The heart makes a good garnish,
red-petaled and splayed like a radish,
its blossom, proof that a knife
once sliced it. Is it reasonable
to believe we must suffer in love?
Should we expect it to hurt just a bit?
Don Hogle was the winner of the 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review poetry contest as selected by Alberto Rios and a finalist in the 2015 Northern Colorado Writers and Aesthetica Creative Writing contests. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, New Verse News and Shooter and A3 Review in the U.K. among others. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com
Featured image via Flickr.
Where was Bernard? She wiped spilled sugar
from the gold-flecked Formica table and began
preparing deviled eggs. Henrietta thought about the day
she’d told him the good news, right after the Herring Festival.
She ate a candied apple at the bar and he’d shouted,
“Sambuca for everyone!” And how months later she’d sat
at this very table, timing her contractions while anthrax
updates aired on CNN. He was getting his beard trimmed
at the barbershop when she called to say, “It’s time!”
In the elevator at Mt. Sinai she knew not even morphine
could save her now. Bernard bought a bag of salted Fiji
almonds in the gift shop, and the male nurse warned him,
“None for Henrietta, only ice chips!” She hated the nurse
and the COURTESY COUNTS button pinned to his scrubs.
She hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and what she wanted
even more than Demerol were oysters. A dozen slippery
oysters nestled in those ice chips. The way she’d had them
at the café on Rivington Street the night she knew
she was pregnant. Henrietta put the plate of deviled eggs
on the table. She’d dyed the whites pink, and stuck sprigs
of something fragrant and green in the creamy centers.
Bernard phoned, he was running late as usual, “Don’t start
without me.” He said he was hungry for something
cooked with love.
Liora Mondlak is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for December 2017.
Liora Mondlak remembers accompanying her mother to the market in Mexico City, where she grew up. She remembers the chickens hanging by their feet, and the sawdust around her saddle shoes. Years later, she would return to the market to buy ground chameleon, a well-known love potion, which she uses sparingly.
She lives in New York with her teenage daughter, where she teaches art and poetry. Lioramondlak.com
Featured image via Pixabay.
Because there are many cheesy sentiments, but not many sentiments about cheese.
Dear Camembert,
How I miss your smiling face! Not only were you a stinky liar—a demure 7 ounces, your nutrition label claimed to serve 35!—but when I saw you on sale, unwanted and about to expire, I doubted your fatty goodness. After all, what kind of French cheese costs $1.99?
Oh, you were creamy! But not the mighty 3,500 calories you claimed to be. Did you give a sh*t? No, no whey.
And until the very end you laughed, living large in a fat-free world.
Pune Dracker is studying creative nonfiction at the New School. She writes, runs and dances, and is a huge proponent of sauerkraut.
Featured image via Pixabay.
