Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than 170 other publications.
Justin Marks’ books are, You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored, (Barrelhouse Books, 2014) and A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009). He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and their son and daughter. For more, go to http://justinmarks.net/. 
I listen to the dark, that souvenir of light. What is darned and holed. I listen to the darts, the ends of their lines. Sometimes, I mute my reds to mauves, it is a slight denial, but some turns are slight. Sometimes, I want to scream, but I don’t.
*
The way we move through this world is a placement of position and time. The wilderness of my placement. I place my tongue to my lips; I place my eyes on these words; I place my trust in this world, but who is piecing together these days? Who is pruning the hours?
*
I ordered take-out the other day, pushed the front door open and out I was into a cold, beautiful fall day. As I crossed the street, and noticed a family walking in front of me, past an Italian restaurant.
The child, a small girl, was screaming, I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore.
She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. She was running alone, in front of her father. He didn’t run after her, but had her in his gaze. He didn’t seem alarmed, but I was.
He was yelling behind her, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I can’t take it anymore, she screamed louder, as her face became covered in tears, I want to go to that restaurant, she began to bawl.
A part of me laughed at the absurdity of a small girl screaming that she couldn’t take it. Another part of me laughed at the absurdity of a small girl screaming that she couldn’t take it anymore.
It is hard to take it and go on with another hour, another day. Life isn’t fair.What is or isn’t fair, is still yours. You are yours.
*
In the movies, you learn to be your own leading lady. You learn to make your own. You learn to be yourself. Every dribble, every let-down and lug, every lie you keep at your breast, is an errand of desire. I know that everything I have created has been for me, for this life.
I can’t, but I will. I will.
Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2018. She is also the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Journal, and Thrush Poetry Journal. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. More at www.LeahUmansky.com.
featured image via Axel and Sophie Steenberg.
Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2018. She is also the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Journal, and Thrush Poetry Journal. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. More at www.LeahUmansky.com.
featured image via Steve Minor on Flickr.
In January of 1974, a five-pound bag of sugar cost 85 cents; by year-end, just in time for the office cookie exchange, the price of the same five-pound bag increased to $2.35. The trend was driven by a complicated combination of geopolitical events, including bad weather that wiped out crops, changes in domestic subsidies, import quotas and tariffs, along with a growing national sweet tooth.
I was aware of the price-hike and the reasons behind it not because I was a preternaturally astute observer of market forces but because I worked after school and on weekends as a cashier for Shop-Rite supermarket in our largely working-class neighborhood. Where there had once been rows of yellow and white Domino sugar bags, shelves were empty. Cereal, candy, bottled juice, cakes and cookies, baking mixes, even TV dinners with their gelatinous desserts, were now out of reach for many customers. With soaring prices, the market behaved as if there were a shortage. Management cut back on inventory and over the course of the year customers who would typically buy one bag of sugar every couple of weeks hoarded it whenever word circulated that another price increase was on the horizon. For a short time, my store rationed sugar at one 5-pound bag per customer. Some families gamed the system by having each spouse and child march through the checkout line alone with a single bag.
For some of us, myself included, it was the best thing that could have happened. At the time, I took my coffee with three teaspoons of sugar and drank a lot of soda. During weekend lunch breaks, a friend and I would share a smoke and to satisfy the inevitable hunger attack that followed would devour a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. There was no combination of sugar and fat that I would turn down.
My consumption of all things sugary had to stop. Over time I weaned myself of sugary drinks and sweetened coffee. It helped that nutritionists were finding an audience for their claims that sugar was detrimental to one’s health. They encouraged consumers to find alternatives, like fresh fruit for dessert and fruit juices or plain water instead of soda. Newspapers and magazines published recipes for sugar-free desserts. The sugar crisis of the ‘70s marked the beginning of my interest in healthy eating.
Alas, in the forty-plus intervening years, sugar and its evil sibling high-fructose corn syrup, continue to be a mainstay of the American diet. You find it in the obvious places but also hidden in processed foods like bottled salad dressings, canned soups, hot dogs, bread, and even in nut butters. While sugar alone has been cited as the cause of obesity and the associated illnesses (heart-disease, diabetes, and certain cancers), Gary Taubes, (The Case Against Sugar Knopf, December 2016) writes in the Wall Street Journal that “the evidence for the hypothesized chain of cause and unfortunate effects—eat sugar, become insulin-resistant, fatter and diabetic and then die prematurely—is ambiguous. It will probably stay that way. The National Institutes of Health have never seen the need for the expensive clinical trials that would be needed for a rigorous study of the issue.”
We do know with certainty that those whose eat a lot of processed foods are not as healthy as those who don’t and processed foods are where sugar lurks (along with other dubious ingredients). The good news is that the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a change in nutrition labels that will require manufacturers to list how many grams of sugar have been added to a product and what percentage of the recommended daily maximum that represents. Curious minds want to know, everyone else should know.
Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2018. She is also the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Journal, and Thrush Poetry Journal. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. More at www.LeahUmansky.com.
featured image via Vivienne Gucwa on Flickr.
Yesterday, I walked the loop of the Central Park Reservoir. I entered from the west side. This December, is another stubborn fall. Nothing lets.
Nothing lets go: the reds and golds and greens.
[And why should it?]
Bask, more. Rest, more. We all need to self care. We can see the gold fleeing.
Look.
It is deceiving. We often deceive ourselves with the mischievous, with pleasure, with time and with taste. We like what we like. The tongue knows its way of selection, what it finds charming. It is a kind of craving only the sweet drums down.
The sweet.
The sweet sort of steps out from behind, something hard to notice.
The margins of our appetite are a leap from the tongue. One danger dims another. One danger suffices. One betrayal forks it all up to chance.
Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2018. She is also the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length, Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Journal, and Thrush Poetry Journal. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. More at www.LeahUmansky.com.
featured image via Tartelette on Flickr.
The morning after the election I made three batches of soup. And then, on the back of a piece of scratch paper, I wrote a poem.
I did all this before thinking. I did this as immediate coping. I had not slept well, had had nightmares, the kind many of us are continuing to have, maybe will keep having. And I was hung over, fuzzy headed. Like many of us, I’d been drinking too much in the weeks leading up to the vote. Like many of us, I’d been drinking through it.
In the morning, my first thought was of anger and hurt but also of needing to work and work hard. Of needing to clean house. I know myself well: I know that even though Descartes says “I think therefore I am” I myself can’t think until I build up the very base of my being. I am, yes, but I have to work to think, and I know that my body frames my thought: My mind is securely lodged in my body. My body doesn’t work unless I feed it.
That morning, even before the coffee was made, I had the broth and the sweet potatoes and the quinoa on the table. I shredded the chicken scraps. I went out in the cold air and picked our chard. I washed it. I smashed up garlic. The kids weren’t up yet. Hitting the board felt good. The board held my anger. I wanted to make the biggest meal possible out of all the odds and ends we had around the house. And I wanted the dirt on my fingers. I wanted to feel that even if the world might be collapsing inward on some angry toxic axis of hatred, there would still be people working to feed other people and that I would be one of them.
I cook because it helps me think not with my mind but with my hands, my body, my grief. I cook because you can gather the food and lay it out and prepare it and make do with what you have—water, salt, bones, a few dry potatoes, whatever survived the rain— and then you can move around the kitchen and in a few hours have something real: a meal, which can be served at a table, at which people can gather themselves. Cooking is cheap pleasure with high rewards. You can pass time making something everyone needs: food.
Cooking, when done right, is unfussy, steadying, and necessarily hopeful—it imitates and partakes in the efforts of making art but promises something immediately tangible—a meal, a gift, a jar of jam, some cake. You can make something out of even your lemon rinds. You can give what you made to someone and it will make their life better too. I love my poems, but I have to be honest: I cannot always say that of my poems.
I loved the cold feel of dirt on my hands that morning. It was sobering to be at the level of osmosis and humus and clay, of the minerals that we are made of and which will outlast us— even if we are destroying our own time on the planet. These are the minerals we will each one day become, maybe sooner than we wish. I was grateful again that the chard seemed to be going on getting bushy despite the blistering idiot who may now take power and the raw rotten stink of hate on the table of this broken America.
I was grateful to be in my body, to have a body.
I cook because I commit again to belonging to the gathering I hope for. I commit to the idea of nourishing and being nourished and coming to the big table. And I commit to being part of a chain of interdependence, one that says “because others are, I am, and because I am, I can think and work and pray.” Food reminds me that I am not alone: none of us is alone. Because none of us is only ourselves, we are our food and the planet that grew it. We are sunlight and soil. And we are not mere demographies or representations: we are real. Each of our bodies can build a house or feed a body or stage a protest or sing a song.
That morning I chopped potatoes, and I didn’t think exactly. But what I think my body was trying to craft even then was not just soup but hope: hope not only that we all be fed, but also that the hands building the meal might also build a poem, a room, more justice. My hands were telling me as I chopped not to despair. I believe in food. I believe in art. I heard my knife hitting and hitting the board.
Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book is Work & Days, which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic.” Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor recently was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award to study and lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for six months in 2017.
featured image via Marjan Lazarevski on Flickr.
Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book is Work & Days, which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic.” Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor recently was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award to study and lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for six months in 2017.
featured image via Tasty Kitchen.
Can you believe it? It’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts. Thanksgiving is upon us, and the shopping season will begin in earnest with the dreaded Black Friday mayhem.
Here’s a thought: if you’re here, it’s because you’re interested in food. You care about how your meals are prepared, where your ingredients come from, and whether there’s enough healthy food to go around. Last year’s suggested gift list comprised organizations that provide direct services, in the way of training and meals, to individuals and communities.
This year, I’m turning my attention to organizations that work on a national and global scale to make sure that policies that protect our food supply are furthered in Washington. They are our eyes and ears. We need desperately to make sure these organizations flourish. Oftentimes they help us take direct action to influence government and industry. You can look over their websites and subscribe to their newsletters before making a commitment to membership.
Once you’ve made up your mind about where to direct your dollars, you can buy a membership or make a donation for yourself and on behalf of friends.
Center for Science in the Public Interest CSPI is the first organization that captured my attention decades ago. I like its straightforward approach, its commitment to research and action on nutrition, food safety, and health. I just renewed my subscription to Nutrition Action Healthletter and added one for a friend. You can do the same.
Environmental Working Group Tucked into my wallet is a laminated card that lists on one side the EWG “Dirty Dozen,” the fruits and vegetables with the highest concentration of pesticides; on the other is a list of the “Clean 15,” the produce that is typically free of pesticides. It’s a handy list that I consult when I visit farmers markets and grocery stores. The EWG’s mission is to be an advocate for public health. It’s an organization that is worth supporting. And this year the EWG has a holiday gift basket that comes with a tax-deductible donation of $140. or more.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s overall mission is to protect natural resources here and around the globe. It continues to sound the alarm about the dangers of climate change and backs up its claims with scientific research. In the area of food safety, the NRDC pushes corporations and policymakers to reduce harmful chemicals in our food. It fights for stronger pollution controls on industrial farms and helps small farmers safeguard their crops against climate change.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. It states that its mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.” We need the kind of in-depth reporting that ProPublica is committed to supporting. A recent story revealed that the “farm-to-table” label is often misleading if not completely bogus. We need these kinds of exposes to keep our institutions honest.
“Action creates / a taste / for itself” writes the great poet Kay Ryan in “That Will to Divest.” Let’s get started.