A Literary Feast

Posts by Sarah Kanabay

Gone, Fishing.

Posted on February 14th, 2013

A storm has started outside. The air is growing white as the breath of it picks up speed. The space heater by my feet churns in a loud hum. Two birds cut the sky through the window, here in this yolk-yellow aerie above Haywood Street. It is my job, for this year, to keep this gambrel-roofed house in one piece. Somewhere south and west, in a winter-dark river, is an eel weir. It is at least a century old. The wind is pushing billows past the glass, long plumes of cold. On a map of the current weather, I can see that my hill town and that other river sit roughly in the same deep purple band of snow. I wonder about the work…

Wild Goose Chase, Resolved.

Posted on January 21st, 2013

It does not have to be good You do not have to wok a hundred chiles Through immolation on your knees, weeping. You have only to let the soft loaf of your body eat what it eats. Tell me how you prepare, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the dinner goes on. Meanwhile Fieri and the clogged icons of the airways are chewing across the landscapes over the squeeze bottles and the deep freeze the pizzas and the poppers. Meanwhile the Achatz, high in the Alinead air is making foams again. Whoever you are, no matter how lowly, the farm offers itself to your imagination, fat with wild beets, fibrous and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the plating of…

Burnt Ends

Posted on January 3rd, 2013

New Year’s Eve celebrations in Orange, Massachusetts, involve a long parade of giant puppets through the center of town.  A farm truck  tows revelers playing Thin Lizzy loudly, and your shirt feels sleeveless, spiritually.  Your sideburns ghost down over your cheeks, regardless of your gender.  A friend has manned the sweaty interior of the broad-assed mayoral figurine in prior years–this year, he’s elsewhere, celebrating with others.  The fog grows in the streets. But the evening really begins in a parking lot, a church parking lot, where you eat mediocre Chinese food out of a bag in the front seat of a Honda Fit, double parked behind a minivan.  The New Year tastes like MSG.  The New Year is already giving you heartburn.  The New…

Comfort Me With Sharp Objects

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Some people are comforted by a cigarette. I’d heard the stories about the healing properties of warm milk. I was feeling sorry for myself, and I chose the headless duck.   Who knows what I was feeling sorry about—I was 23, and didn’t really need a reason. Maybe it was one of those days where I’d sat on the upturned milk crate behind the coffee shop that I was working at, furiously scribbling in my notebook about how undignified it was that I had to serve lattes to my former professors, when I was pretty sure I was supposed to be writing a novel instead. Maybe it was the time I’d had so many gallons of espresso that I’d sweated my way into heart…

The Whole Wide World

Posted on September 17th, 2012

I am fifteen, when it starts, or fifteen and a half, and I have cut off most of my hair. We are in the same creative writing class, and I’ve started to write these poems, about an older boy that I don’t know, because it’s safe, and whatever adolescent longing I’ve accumulated from being the bookish, blush-prone, chubby nerdy girl who then developed a love of backpacking and wearing men’s boxer shorts as outside shorts doesn’t matter, in between the syllables. One of these poems, I can’t remember which, makes you write me a letter, and hand it to me, as we’re leaving class. The letter tells me that I have stunned you. You have a girlfriend. I ignore them, those two stray marks…

Little Green Knife

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Stockings have always been my favorite part of Christmas. No matter what grandiose lumpy mystery package awaited me beneath the tree, the real prize that hauled me out of my bed in the pre-dawn of Christmas morning was the knitted bulky oversized sock that hung by the fireplace (with or without care). When I was younger, it was an endless stream of trinkets, (anchored down at the toe by a corpulent orange), whose number seemed to approach the infinite. How many tubes of sparkling lip balm can this stocking hold? A billion. That’s how many. When I graduated to the realm of more sedate adult gifts, including genuine enthusiasm for woolly socks, the plump, swaying, charcuterie-esque bulge of my Yuletide stocking still held sway…

Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down

Posted on July 19th, 2012

1. hot august it’s all arm, cherries pits spitting humid, spitting whole afternoons you say larb and I say yes and the sheets will barely be remembered– who lets a college kid house-sit anyway? It’s all pits, hot mouths lost phone numbers. 2. cold mid-winter prospect heights he says hey I say hello, the warm startle of breath on breath, and later butter, but squid curry first our faces vague with heat in an anywhere restaurant, until the hallway bathroom, shared and I say oh so this is Brooklyn.

In the Jaws

Posted on June 25th, 2012

“I will pee off the side of this boat if I have to. I’ve done it before.”   I thought this even while I thought about the multiple layers of pants and rubber and rain-soaked nylon that I was currently sporting. I’d make it work. I had one mark against me already by being dickless, so, I’d just have to metaphorically sack up and make the micturition happen, one way or another.   I was perched on the prow bench seat of a flat-bottomed fishing boat, somewhere off of the coast of Tillamook, OR. When your friend asks you if you want to go fishing with a wild-eyed, Columbia-educated strawberry farmer who tends bar at the sushi joint they both work at, and tells…

Caramel Apple, Dulce Filled, Burning Spoon

Posted on February 14th, 2012

Caramel apple, dulce filled, burning spoon, Dark smell of nori, wrappers dark and bright, What secret flavor is clasped between your layers? What primal palate does crab touch with its pincers? Ai, Love is a journey through all dive bars, Where closeted air tastes sharply of fermented grain: Love is a war of lightening Two recipes ruined by artificial sweetness. Lick by lick, I drink your tiny infinity, Your margarine, your almonds slivered, your Maillard villages, Ribs generate fire, transformed by heat’s bite, Smoke pink through the marrow channels of blood To precipitate a nocturnal consummation To be dinner, eaten by fridge light in the dark.

Tropic of Cutlet

Posted on February 13th, 2012

To eat you must first open your mouth. You must have an alimentary canal, and a little knowledge of forks. It is not necessary to have a knife or mandoline. The essential thing is to want to eat. Then it is a meal. I am cooking. It is you, cutlet, that I am eating. I wish that I could eat better, or more languidly, but, then perhaps you never have actually consented to dine with me. Others have eaten you and only half finished, leaving you cold. They claimed to eat beautifully, but, were, let’s face it, kind of picky in the end. It is the somethingth of February—I no longer keep track of the menus. Would you say—the takeout of last week? There…