How was your Thanksgiving? What were the standout dishes? For gluten free me, it was the garlic-y sour cream mashed potatoes at one dinner, and the filling (avoiding the crust) from a homemade blueberry pie at another friend's home! (If I'm lucky, my friend might be able to learn the secret ingredient from the pie maker, who bakes pies professionally.)
My friend Michael Magee is an excellent poet, and generously agreed to share a nourishment-oriented poem!
My friend Michael Magee is an excellent poet, and generously agreed to share a nourishment-oriented poem!
Michael is a poet whose book Cinders of My Better Angels
was published by MoonPath Press. His recent chapbook Dementia: Love is a Blur is about his wife, Jean. A new book with photos by Jeff Acorn and Michael's poems -- Vanishing Points -- is soon to appear. He was a featured reader in Tacoma's October '17 Creative Colloquy "Pub Crawl." Other poems appear in Pennine Ink, Staxtes Greek Literary Journal, and Cirque.
The poem "Odysseus Among the Lettuce Eaters" is part of a longer poem cycle.
Michael won a First Prize in the Dancing Poetry Contest in San Francisco, and lived and worked in England, where he read on BBC Radio 1. His poem "A Night in Reading Gaol with Oscar Wilde" was also produced in England.
Michael's favorite cuisine is Mediterranean and Turkish, stuffed peppers and potatoes with lots of Odyssean Greek salads and Kalamata olives, along with Raki and Ouzo. On the English side, it's Shepherd's Pie with MP sauce, a cultural "treasure."
Michael's poem:
(Copyright, Michael Magee, 2017, all rights reserved)
POEM FOR THE POET STARVING TO DEATH
ON HIS OWN VOCABULARY
I have bitten off the words
let them cold on my tongue
without sense or taste
not even a pinch of salt.
I kept only my bad breath
starving on this silence
gnawing the same old bones,
settling for grubs and roots.
But I crave darker met,
anything I can chew on,
fat, gristle, the scraps
from someone else's table.
Michael Magee
published in Poetry Northwest
was published by MoonPath Press. His recent chapbook Dementia: Love is a Blur is about his wife, Jean. A new book with photos by Jeff Acorn and Michael's poems -- Vanishing Points -- is soon to appear. He was a featured reader in Tacoma's October '17 Creative Colloquy "Pub Crawl." Other poems appear in Pennine Ink, Staxtes Greek Literary Journal, and Cirque.
The poem "Odysseus Among the Lettuce Eaters" is part of a longer poem cycle.
Michael won a First Prize in the Dancing Poetry Contest in San Francisco, and lived and worked in England, where he read on BBC Radio 1. His poem "A Night in Reading Gaol with Oscar Wilde" was also produced in England.
Michael's favorite cuisine is Mediterranean and Turkish, stuffed peppers and potatoes with lots of Odyssean Greek salads and Kalamata olives, along with Raki and Ouzo. On the English side, it's Shepherd's Pie with MP sauce, a cultural "treasure."
Michael's poem:
(Copyright, Michael Magee, 2017, all rights reserved)
POEM FOR THE POET STARVING TO DEATH
ON HIS OWN VOCABULARY
I have bitten off the words
let them cold on my tongue
without sense or taste
not even a pinch of salt.
I kept only my bad breath
starving on this silence
gnawing the same old bones,
settling for grubs and roots.
But I crave darker met,
anything I can chew on,
fat, gristle, the scraps
from someone else's table.
Michael Magee
published in Poetry Northwest
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