Tag: lettuce

Remembering the Joy of a Sandwich Before the Summer of Cyclospora by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Remembering the Joy of a Sandwich
Before the Summer of Cyclospora

If sex were a sandwich
it would have to be a BLT.
Not just any BLT, but the one he
made for you simply because
you hadn’t tasted one in years.
Sharing a meal with him is
a religious experience, every
nibble a communion. Imagine
him frying up the bacon,
flipping it as you watch
pork fat     s   i   z   z   l   e     s   l   o   w.
And that intoxicating scent—
no confusing his umami tease.
He goldilocks the sourdough,
toasting it just right. Then he
slathers one slice with aioli
and fig jam on the other. You
watch his hands crack open
a head of iceberg lettuce
so cool & crisp you can taste it
calving as he slides a bite
into the ocean of your mouth.
And then, he gives you his big
tomato heart, tangy & sweet
with a touch of salt—that taste
you can’t get enough of. His taste
you never grow tired of, that
makes you sweat like it’s August
every month of the year.
Another perfect day to stay inside—
with or without a bed of lettuce.

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, running The Poetry Box press. Her poems have recently appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Sheila-Na-Gig, Jackdaw Review, Gyroscope Review, and the award-winning anthology, Love Is for All of Us. Shawn is a multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee and has won prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her newest book Pockets (MoonPath Press) was a finalist in Concrete Wolf’s Chapbook Contest. When not writing, find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter, RedShoePoet.com.

Two Poems by Sara Eddy

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Going to Seed

I left lettuce flouncing out in container boxes
ready for picking. I was on the road, ready
for the expansion of travel. Lettuce can’t hold me.

You want a pretty big container for head-growth
and root-spread. It’s almost too on the nose: harvest
leaves from the outside to encourage inner growth.

Lettuces shouldn’t sit next to apples or bananas.
Ethylene causes rapid decay, like too much time
in the city, your feet on concrete.

Lettuce must be eaten fresh, taken as it is, demands
fealty to its moment. It will go to seed before I get back,
and I’ll toss it on the compost for the rabbits and worms.

*

Uphill

I’m driving around looking for a farm stand when my doctor calls.
You don’t know how to be alive she says, something like that.

I don’t really hear her. I’m thinking about hills, where they come from,
whether they feel us scrambling up and down. Whether all the hills

I’ve climbed add up to a mountain, and when it is I’ll be over the hill.
Everything about hills. Now she’s saying you’ve forgotten how to sleep.

I wake up 45x an hour, she says, which isn’t really sleeping at all, is it?
I feel like arguing: that’s the way I’ve always slept, and no one ever complained.

But truly it is harder now to get up these hills. Maybe she’s right,
I don’t know how to be alive. I do know that fresh vegetables

are good for poetry. Hills are good for poetry. And lying awake in bed wondering
how it has come to this, that we don’t even know how to sleep in our tired bodies.

*

Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, and her chapbook of poems about plants, Jewelweed, is forthcoming from Finish Line Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.