“Post Discovery Food” by Lyz Soto

Author Questions:

I tend to experience life through food. Many of my best memories are somehow associated with the consumption, the making, or the buying of food. In Post Discovery Food I tried to use food items as cultural, geographical, time, and capitalist markers.

• Do the food images in the poem create a sense of travel between stanzas and experiences?
• Should I give more detailed images of place along side the descriptions of eating and food?

With a‘a between her toes,
she grew with hard skinned feet
as everyday tokens licking
sea from baked skin
spitting blood sucked tomatoes
and husked peaches
from her tongue
from her split lips
this flaccid desiccated fruit
a pacific
milled
care package.

With cotton dust between her toes, she
bit a road side peach to dripping
from fingers to thighs to
bare arches to
this bite becomes
hints at raptures.

With a marble cold slab beneath her toes,
with mozzarella and balsamic
with discovery between her teeth here
she held a tomato as
a ripe heart bursting.

With a‘a between her toes,
sucking lychee
lilikoi apple banana
guava from fingers
and palms here sip
her youth in your mouth. Find
her in the breaking fast
in the last swallow
before sleep.

© 2011 by Lyz Soto