so, I’m spinning around the room
circling my kitchen island
like Billy Collins searching for the perfect metaphor
like a shark in quest of cheese
covering my plates with crackers and cocktail onions
marinated mushrooms, their little heads popping up
one eyed olives winking red
prosciutto flopped over like it only just realized
you can’t be in shape with all that fat
smoked salami smirking
at how carefully it’s preserved

grab the glass and take a big swig
company is coming and the mood needs to build
the words need to flow, language like lava
sweeping the entire village in its hot wake
even though you threw a sacrifice of rum
which reminds you of the bottle you dropped last night, red sidling
into all the cracks, it took hours to clean that up
and still you have your doubts
something surely must be lurking in the corners
like a stale cocktail peanut crouching under the stove

the fire goddess said it wasn’t enough, it will never be enough
no matter how high you pile the plates, something always comes up short
carrying the guests down the lazy river
where everyone is laughing and everything is all right
where everyone always comes up cold in the end
shivering in their damp clothes, rushing hard for their cars
leaving you alone in the kitchen
where mountains of plates totter, like Vesuvius on the make

hands red, the victim of a thousand pyroclastic flows
parties that ran just a little bit late
like a bargirl who let her cigarette burn down too low
you scrub at your silverware, wondering
what ever was the point in the first place, why
you throw your heart on the altar, just
to find it tossed back at the end of the night
only picked at, never devoured
so sigh and scrape it into yesterday’s trash
with the rinds and the plastic
all your dirty, broken treats

Kathryn Leonard-Peck writes poetry, plays, short stories, and novels. She also paints. She graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia Law School, and is an attorney. She currently lives on a farm on Martha’s Vineyard with her family. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals. She was the second place winner for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing (MVICW) Vineyard Writers Fellowship, and was accepted to the Aspen Autumn Words juried workshop program.

how bright my face shines

I keep my body
hungry to test

pain’s proximity
oranges remind me

of dried bitters
in whiskey not you

a little bit of magic exists
everyday think of the blue

liquid that turns dull clothes
whiter and brighter

a chemical romance
I wonder about absorption

love has unblinded me
to the many ways holding

brings joy how I prefer
a cigarette over a vape

your mouth held many
silences so that you didn’t

have to become a liar
there are many ways to kill

a cat has nine lives
I want to see a pink flamingo

for real not the décor lighting
before I die let me tell you

there is no substitute
for experience except

experience and even god
cannot stop time

from turning so I teach
myself to mimic the rain

relish the pain
repurpose like Marie Kondo

I get the flu from eating an orange
is just another memory now

of where we met so I peel it
dry it grind it mix it

with milk into a glow mask

January

Sifting through grey days in a shoebox
room overlooking the Hudson
and helicopters flying to and fro over it
carrying people obsessed with aerial view
some days it’s the delicious call of pork tacos
on 42^nd street, and on others it’s the 99 cent
pizza slices down at 9^th street that pull me out
of my bed and winter misery.

Turning the page of The Crying Book and disembarking
at 14^th street only to find that I have layered all  wrong
again     find myself walking to 16^th and 5^th to my favorite café
creamy spinach quiches and potato burekas on display
outside               hats flying, dead leaves dancing in circles
levitating            marrying the smoke from kebabs sizzling
in halal carts at street corners

hands become ice from collecting the 8 PM rain                craving
for the warmth of a mocha cappuccino from the little patisserie
in East Village   the familiar attendant at the register smiles puts in a free
chocolate glazed donut in my bag            Enjoy! And I start to
think of the promise of summer as I bite into this kindness.

Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer, currently matriculating her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, New York. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Lunch Ticket, Evocations Review, Vagabond City, The Remnant Archive, Pile Press, SLAB and elsewhere. When not cooking poems, she is found reading war histories or experimenting with different kinds of curries. You can get in touch with her @beingadtastic

Out of temper, stirred
to a mantra of degrees
I repeat to keep myself
awake in the kitchen, where
I might be blistering
tomatoes or toasting bread
in the rich kind of fat
for a midnight snack,
chocolate reaches a point
where I can only feel
the weight of it on my lip.
Sometimes your body
against mine passes through
this moment, stirred
down and sprawling.

Vanessa Young is a poet, cooking instructor, and the founder of Thirsty Radish (https://www.thirstyradish.com/), where she shares recipes and inspires a creative approach to life in and out of the kitchen. Her poetry has appeared in Chronogram, Juked, The Monarch Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

I usually just eat it like this. Kiwis with their skin on             seeds in spices turned black the squash
splitting its hairs from inside out just right there on the plate in its skin I usually eat it like that.
Usually the skin and all I’ll just eat it like that when we wake up. Raw franks             the real snappy
ones or the Vermont beef ones             the beef in Vermont ones like that with the skin on too. I liked
when you ate things just like that after we’d fallen asleep and woken up because you weren’t
afraid             dirty hairy sweet potato skins or morning acids acrid on shriveled green
whatever’s pink and gone sour             deadened legumes             lime halves in quiet disarray
whatever’s separated from that which lies underneath it             whatever’s separated from that
which cooks right there next to it

anything that grows the way grass does             that floats down brooks.

Ginger with its skin on downstairs             ginger with its skin on raw             the cooked the rotten. I
usually just eat it like that in a little fur coat that is             there’s no need to undress yet             I just
eat that on top of some rice             I just eat that with rice. Everything’s been left dirty enough to
eat             passed round the city like this on hands wheels laps crates pillows             been left clean
enough to lack             in tins of oil or tight plastic

I just eat it with my hands in front of the fridge light like that like a bear by a river or at a cafe for
sixteen fifty downtown like that like a girl.

Who am I my tail is melting in a sour broth             my morning stomach on two tortillas. You fried
me up with two eggs             flu eggs             you wanted to mix my oil and mustard at the lunch
counter             get me on hot salad at the sandwich shop             my ribs floated above your noodles
my shoulders have caught your snot by the open kitchen. I’m for the people in bits inside a
one-way street             or tied up in strings for not the people             I’m good for more than a buck
thirty don’t you think             you liked each other because you liked me.

Kath DeGennaro is a writer originally from Long Island. A graduate of The New School with her BA in The Arts, she currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is most often focused on documenting the Gowanus Canal.

Salad forks scrape
across scalloped plates
from a window I watch
them serve the main course:
duck au confit
avec herbs de provence
satin dresses & designer suits
each face same choreography:
chew, dab, smile, laugh, chew
I eat a stale peanut granola bar
and turn back into the wind
naked limbs of winter
stretch towards me
while indoors they pop
Moët & Chandon
for one moment my eyes meet
another’s: gentle brown,
they might have been hers
but the mouth is rigid,
a life in training to live
in opulence without
ever understanding
its decadence
and by the time I glance back
she is lost on the ballroom floor

Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the author of a poetry collection (Clothesline, 2023) and four poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottle Cap Press. Her debut novel will be published by Type Eighteen Books (November 2023). 

funky aged ham
pale as a Christmas star
like skiing in Aspen
mashed potato gilding
off cornices
cranberry gems
collapse
dinner roll walls and greased gravy ponds
cannot hold back the trash
when they stand
on forked feet
of molded, mangy
mushy fat ham
centerpiece left to accidentally slow cook
(thanks Uncle Fred, we really didn’t need that)
abandoned, collapsing
now
the night breaks us
with it

French Toast and a Live DJ
too early to wake up
too late to sleep
too sober to get down
breakfast is meant
to be silent
near solemn
over my French toast
I grit furred teeth
as the café is wracked
by a DJ’s table-rattling
milk-curdling
egg-scrambling
beat box to hell, howling
garbage disposal, demon despoiling
my syrupy communion
lost grace on my tongue

Tain Leonard-Peck is a writer, actor, monologist, and model. He paints and composes music, and is a competitive sailor, skier, and fencer. He is the Poet Laureate for West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard. Among his awards, he won #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence, the first place Poetry Fellowship to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Honorable Mention for the Creators of Literary Justice Award, by IHRAF, the largest human rights art festival in the world. His work has been published in numerous literary journals. He is completing his first novel.

After A R MacDougall’s recipe in The Gourmets’ Almanac 1931
‘If you know any newly rich bootleggers or any racketeering parvenus who would care to
make a sensation at one of their costly dinner parties…’

Take an olive, marinaded in oil and
stuff it into the smallest bird you can –
a fig-pecker, or fat and fleshy ortolan.

Once the ortolan has been stuffed
place it in something bigger, say, a thrush;
the thrush, then is also trussed

then placed within a plump plover;
but make sure you give that a cover
of bacon, or something similar, so that over

and through it all the juices run
and mingle. Then get a fat young capon
Or pheasant (if pheasant, make sure it’s hung),

which then goes inside a goose, young and tender.
Cook it slow so that the fat will render
down, and after several hours send an

odour of plains, forests, marshes, poultry yards.
Then take each bird, unpick it, discard
the carcasses, one by one. This bit’s hard

because you want to eat them, enjoy the flavour,
the reward of all those hours waiting and labour.
But, now take the olive, pop it in your mouth –
              And savour.

Saleel Nurbhai grew up in the UK and Australia. He has published short stories and poetry which have been included in The Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry and in 20/30 Vision, and he has written and performed monologues and short stories for the radio. He’s also published theatre and music reviews, academic essays and articles, and is co-author of the monograph, George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels. He now teaches part-time for Lancaster University.

Instead of jewels, I gather gooseberries—
the taste of jade. Or mince the flesh of tomatillos
to moisten them with fresh lime, coarse salt,
and virgin oil. Note to self: Take notice.

At my birth, tickling my ear with her gorgeous finger,
she said I will never forget you. Cherries, grapes,
eggs, we were born from imagination.

A recipe holds the future. A bit of my mother’s
knuckle grated into the latkes we made together.
I bury the cleaver in the carving board
to forget that she had to die one day.

We laughed and sucked the mangoes
dry over the sink, the cabbage shrinking
in the dish as I cradle her face
between my hands.

Beneath the lavender in the window box
I find dead birds, such perfume in
loneliness, the holiness of that place
And so many mouths to feed—

Now the clinking of an ice-cold kitchen—
the room exhales its sheer white curtains
Walls, the color of custard peel away.
Paint, potato, skin. One lives a full life

to tell a simple story.
I slit the onion, and watch it weep.

Rozanne Gold, an award-winning chef, food writer, journalist, end-of-life doula, and a Jungian psychoanalyst in training, cares deeply about what it means to nourish.  Poet Annie Finch called her “a geographer of women’s souls.” A fixture on New York City’s food scene since 1978 when she was first chef to Mayor Ed Koch, Rozanne is a four-time winner of the James Beard Award and the author of thirteen acclaimed cookbooks. She has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bon Appetit, among others, and was a finalist of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Prize (judge: Victoria Chang). She has an MFA from the New School where she taught “The Language of Food” and is a Board Member of Brooklyn Poets. Her chapbook Mother Sauce was recently published by Dancing Girl Press. (www.rozannegold.com)

With both my pregnancies I vomited
nearly every day, nauseated by cuisine
I grew to love as an adult: grilled swordfish,
seafood paella, tiramisu, crepes. 

Instead, I craved meals from my childhood:
steaming bowls of giblets and rice,
kreplach, knishes and kasha,
mugs of borscht with sour cream,
the Ashkenazi foods of my mother’s youth.
Mom was happy to oblige.

I desired ice cream sundaes topped with hot fudge
and whipped cream (from Friendly’s, Mom’s favorite),
macaroni shells sprinkled with salt, melted margarine
gathered in the crook of the shell.
Bacon, lettuce and tomato club sandwiches
like the ones Mom and I shared in a booth at Brigham’s
after shopping for new school clothes.
Pastina and farina, two dishes she made for me
when I was a fussy toddler.

I lusted after tuna or Italian sub sandwiches—
the ones my Dad brought home to give Mom
a night off from cooking. I dreamt of Chinese food:
egg fu young, egg rolls, bread and butter
on the side, cups of hot tea stirred
with heaping spoonfuls of sugar; my family’s 
Sunday afternoon ritual, the TV blaring
news or sports from the other room.
My husband reluctantly brought them all to me.

In the days following Mom’s death I open
my refrigerator. It overflows with leftover ramen,
chicken cacciatore, fancy cheeses and olives.
Each night my husband lovingly cooks
elaborate fare: fresh snapper, tofu, pesto pizza.
But only the simplest chicken soup with lokshen
comes close to quenching my ache.

A lifelong New Englander, Laurie Rosen’s poetry has appeared in The Muddy River Poetry Review; Peregrine; Oddball Magazine; Zig Zag Lit Mag; Gyroscope Review; Wilderness House Literary Review and elsewhere. 

The only telepathy we knew of was sex. 
You had my face. & my heart. 

& subsuming our base product. Cut the fruit 
but bring only one knife, this time

Derivations or constraints, witness?

( you said you’d be a marlin )
( they said I was a   m i r a g e )

For example, in Icelandic, [k^h] is 
the first sound of kátur meaning ‘cheerful’ 
while [k] is the first sound of gátur meaning ‘riddles’

Pressure or pleasure, mate? 

start into me like plastic cutlery 

Agon
Agon
Anon anon anon

(But I’m out of the bathtub now!)

are you sick? 

no! I’m just getting better!

I lap it like watershed literacy ravishing the magic of knowing, now 
being, participating, seen, participated in — yet I cannot read 
myself, mirror hung face to wall 

(the birds who don’t stop chirping)

I tried but instead it surprised me & I drowned

Hailing from the Pacific Northwest Kristin K. Withers now hazards the heart of Dallas. Her first collection of autoscopic language poetry explores the tortuous tethers of identity, self-conception, desire, & the emotive capacity in reflection thereof. A graduate of TCU with her BA in Philosophy, she is currently domesticating herself & enjoys wizarding chili crisp for friends & chosen family.