Folkcal Fraim 15

Volume 29

Jan 16

The Photo Laureate's Kitchen

Surely again, as if cured by the complexity of taste, the cutlery that makes a collage with collards, or the blasé blasé bouillabaisse of photographic opinions, shallots in shutters, and onions more altered and realtered than the facts and figures of climate change, nature’s homecooked books. Again, pressing the pen too hard against the thin page of perception punctures the toxic puffer fish, the pan of brown hash tagged scripts mashing potatoes into paperbacks. Reprint, a spore, spoiled by juvenilia, the mini artisan that forgot to put the top back on the jar of creative udder, sucked dry. Again, the ground embraces the end of human circulation, every encyclopedic enzyme, but how to right the wrong of it without a Neti pot of grammatical generosity? The quality of lens cloth it takes to make a hardcover, the sheet of tin foil that protects meatloaf from oven heat, from burnt hearsay, point of view topped with tomato gravy. Again, the sign language of sinuses. Again, the first-person of forgiveness, a food corporation turned book depository lacking the budget to be dined on by blame. Surely, nothing in the public domain bakes in click bait more often than finger food, the reality tunnel of papier-maché being chosen by glue or flour. My very own cookie sheet of servitude, the breaded storytelling and seedbank bunker dissident, internal thoughts á l carte. As if anyone can trust the mess hall diarist, the enlisted scribe known for his stunning portraits of wordy casseroles, his lemon and garlic lithographs, the way ink deveins repetition like a bout with top plate, photographic fever, the whole visual meal put together upside down. As if the previous as ifs were no more than something going down the wrong pipe, the rhythm of swallowing interrupted by calculation, resulting in mulch, the merch of soggy manuscripts, each triggered by the aftermath of amnesia and malnutrition, the carp I read in school alongside the crap I ate at home, no room for recovery due to a lack of radical courage. As if blinded by fire and ice, too many precooked thoughts at once, a binder clip caught in the act of biting one of grandma’s quilted biscuits. As if a hemp pimp with a busted lip, all horticulture is hunger. I as if. I paraphrase to maze, to shrink the trip. Stir frying, in writing, to get back at the nonsense of being lied to, the flying sparks recited by hot grease until genius arrives. A backwards glance at what I’ve captured, the unsuccessful hunt of everything except the wild, speckled question mark, my tumorous truth of arrogance. Away from rules, thinking in thirds, because whoever leaked parchment also leaked pasteurization, the potlatch before the potlatch before the potlatch that taught a shy camera to prepare many meals at once. My lab work removes decay, the boasting in the bio, the bloody smoothie left in the blender, every puréed part of unpublishable speech. Again, as if famished by etymology, exiting one of those all you can eat buffets where the food is priced according to the weight of a future indigestion, bones included, and not an entrée more than what can be contained within the form of Styrofoam. The stomach makes demands more guarded than leftovers; if kept settled, on its own river of wine, the ransom is delivered. Again, surely, another supper of superior scraps, our pheasant of pleasure. So much “surely” the short stack of certainty cannot be hacked or buttered by game obtained doubt. An opus, I suppose, worth opposing. Angry as the menagerie of flavors fenced in beneath twilight. Before the task, they state their taste for companies that cater to companionship, small camera intimacy coming at you like lactose missives not milkshakes, as many as the frame can plate.

The baby formula of adult format dictates that books eat words. Photographs, worlds. But the distinction, the title, initially unchewable, cannot be fully savored without the presence of a squad car of rogue basil so do not swallow it whole. Photo deserves a hot pot. Laureate, a coiled burner. Unlike hamburger, neither word needs “helper” to revive its one-dish purpose. Set a timer and walk away from the stovetop of options. Cast iron, a hydrant. Teflon, a flu. I might boil a sentence, fry a fragment, place an image in the blender just to shred predictive editing, the unseasoned reasoning no paragraph, stored then destroyed, can handle. Without getting too spicy, I see what a spy sees. No need to smolder the argument or stiffen the prose into a swirl of paralyzed dip. Protest is never chosen. Born under the sign of all signs, the whole templated sky, it chooses. The ingredients must intensely interact, their meanings marinate, accept the herbalism of sound, of logic struck like a chord. God bless the reader, baked in floor show flour, able to follow rising steam and flying oil to the imprecise destination of comprehension, the original crust unharmed as the cookie dough that terraforms the legs of the dinner table, the knees that first knocked in oatmeal. Too much sugar in the serial number of flakes to become a coherent text but the bottom of the bowl must try. A colossal cobbler, thick biblical bread, and forbidden fruit. Refrigerate, revise, then rate the revision on a scale from chill to first draft, chillin’ to review copy, dope to publication, the eventual def purchase. We slant the language till it slangs, till it swings, till it stings. Because feeling is the microwave most used to nuke thinking, avoid the radiation of long-distance relationships. Those calls used to cost more than warring roses. Emotional ad blockers, those absentee dinner dates damage the soul like misdiagnosed food allergies, no mention of the trouble with truffles, the margarine in the margins where most bestsellers, glazed in hype, end in an online shopping cart, checked out, naked and covered in the hives of dollar signs. Imperfections on the skin, perfections on the rind. A fully nutritional reading experience is like parachuting upward out of a toaster. To combat the vertigo and vomiting of air sickness, chew on fresh ginger. For a possible respiratory infection, place a towel behind the head. Wet face, full inhalation of eucalyptus or lavender. Lung lust, the steam of healing is just another leaving, a masterpiece of pie. Vanilla extract, an opt out. Disease eviction, more remainder than remedy. Whoever named the seeds, named the science. Whoever named the science, named the land. Whoever named the land, named the food. Whoever named the food, named our cycle of life. And yet, no matter how long you rest your face in the steaming pot, glance or gawk, the pore-scorched soak is only enriched by our shared recovery.

Above the sink of dishes, there are books and black and white film in the cupboards, nothing rare, not anything a curious visitor shouldn’t see. I’ve removed the heat resistant moralists and the haters who hem and haw about the mental capabilities of the environment. It’s a space saver, a merger, a decorative step toward a nutritional and intellectual truce. Seven overhead cupboards in all, five that contain books. Food for the body, a flood for the mind. Poems, poems, poems, like pushups; never enough muscle in the black shell to convince all the murdered mussels to open so we read, aloud, anything we can get our tongues on. Literary mouth coup, the Moby mob rule. Brainwashing detergent, dish cloths. I see food and I eat. I picture a book and I read. A whole color-coded meal, dumb-yummy as race making. The seed that grows a bean falls from the same celestial tree as the seed that grows a human, bean to being. Inside every seed, there are more than a billion biological kitchens. On the wall opposite the sink: colorful artwork, three framed paintings and a collage. A chicken boy dribbling a basketball purchased in Santa Fe. “Tears for Federico Garcia Lorca,” Provincetown, Massachusetts. It looks like a bank safe, but the microwave above the stove is basically a safe house for pots and pans, University Presses. I won’t describe (just yet) the tile pattern on the wall between the sink and kitchen library; the camera, hired by art, hired the photograph to do that. That pattern is the reason I chose this place, so I refuse to name it or seek out its meaning or what it references. If nothing else, it simply means someone is here. I haven’t started cooking yet so I refuse to overdo the prep but here’s a ladle of poetic paste. A wrought iron floral portal, English Ivy perhaps, or stargate decor forced to surrender to the kaleidoscope’s double vision of merging and unmerging galaxies, presumably walled in, one of those looking glasses only a non-smiling cat might chase a ball-shaped planet through and never return. I am not chained to a computer when I am gazing into my cupboard. The cupboard books are my current playlist but the books in the cupboard, the ones I’ve burned onto this CD essay, are not my songs. A peek-a-boo for foodies, no discount code to soften the cruel markups. The once popular clamor of readings, a blasphemy against the silence of intellectual hindsight. The best seat in the barn is by the window where the director can’t see you. I purchased the books. I believed in the books, but the battle for truth just wasn’t there. Of the skeletons hanging in their schools, the delectable dark meat was long gone. They didn’t just lynch us. They ate us. A fetus in the franchise, planned. The parents in the black hippie van, planned. The fast food of researched hearsay, the gun tote ear news, planned. Farmers turned many of us in, made purses and grease, and hid our missing in wild greens and leek. Deeply, I wanted to know: who are we eating when we are reading? Regarding my newest paella of everything, know this: cooked at the right temperature, books become human not the other way around, not that hellish black licorice. If, however, the betrayal is as profitable as instant coffee, it’s probably Edwin Land’s brilliant fault. Outside of work, where the polarizing filters go to take advantage of inexpensive light, the hors d’oeuvres deny deception.

I’ve lost so many libraries, over the years, that I have also lost interest in what they represent. Simply put, they weigh too much—the shelves, the lanes of learning, deities of discourse, and piles of organized thought. Enlightened and often un-alived. Smart ghosts at the table of contents, the voices with permanent chairs in our heads. Triumph of the Negro Anti Intellectual, nope. Nothing goes flat faster than printed matter, not even the non-organic evolutionary shift of intellectual interests, debate over. Will you live long enough to see the demise of the poison known as popular culture, you who ran through the hip streets championing the rebellion of diverse rhythms, the equal breathing skirmishes. At least you never wore camouflage or stole pigment from a cauliflower. To be whole is the goal, of substance, but there is another type of hole, loop of loss, in the middle of every doughnut. One of those authors who gives books (and money) away if he has multiple copies. I now have, maybe one book for every fifty books I had before. Gone are the titles that (in my opinion) offered no nutrition, no cake left in the rain, other than the exercise of binge snacking on well packaged plots. Bookflix, a “boo” sentenced to linear images. Not to mention the residue of narratives, carved, and left on the cutting board unable to become the stuff of poetry. Cursive as an unbothered lima stalk, lumpy cookies prove the lack of curvature. Neither time nor history has a monopoly on the earthly page count, tome of delight, the unlocked wine cellar that all micro dosed migraines throb to overcome, the power of the pain killer to dimmish all fear campaigns. Glory to the dish, the low sodium draft dodger, the poem full of lipo-typos that quickly finds the wastepaper basket full of nothing but office hours. Through the irrigated air, a water chestnut crumples. Expensive nonedible editor too skin and bones to weep. Word choice, a deli. Grapes to raisins, cucumbers to pickles, tomatoes to ketchup. A large red onion in vinegar does not last longer than a novella in formaldehyde. On the side of the box, the side effects of servings and ignorance, more excited about the cardboard signage than the nutritional value of the contents. So many odd exclamation points left in the sun, escargots. Cry, I might, as I skewer years and chunks of legwork like one of Miss Lonelyhearts’ passive artichokes. Slide a postcard between Mark Twain’s Roughing It and Carl Jung’s Man and his Symbols then lick the handwriting. The whole kitchen tastes like chicken not just the dingy encyclopedia. A slice of pizza per chapter. Thirsty for tutelage, I, honestly, ate a book of poems a day for nearly ten years. It was like one long one hundred and twenty-month easter egg hunt, the rabbit hole afforded a long lens, shovel length to bookmark the graves. It wasn’t easy deciding which books should go into the cupboards but once flushed, words go to the same place food goes and is transformed into energy. If I was redundant in any of my selections, it was because my teachers, gone now, kept yelling over my shoulder. Like a nocturnal Noctilux naughty by innovation, I also rooster crooned. No crisis of meaning, y’yet, in the flow state. Circulation is essential. Sometimes I stutter just to improvise.

A first book is like a shot in the arm, and (for many writers) not being reviewed prolongs the soreness. It’s like cooking in the dark. A stiffness that causes hesitation, a new strain, the blood clot of writer’s block. Bird flu too, no symptoms, nothing gets in. Yet every alarmist loves the syrupy concoction, the tragic death of the couple on a random bridge. Hard to know, for sure, which photographer is more paranoid, the fatalist or the one who can’t remember anyone from his years of young adulthood. Be wise. Choose the one who flips images with a spatula. Sit for him. On the page, the tenderizer is forced to use a less than stainless tradition. Food tour, a souffle of bookstore appearances, more readings, signings. Because it lacks itinerary, creamy sauce is not a fan of any kind of entourage. No need to emote like a clog, lemon zest scent, fishbone in the blog. Upset about room service, he threw a small jar of jam into the face of time, a clock with so-called hands not a clock with a rectangular, digital screen and red numbers. If the batter is not confusing or an obvious lie, overblown, a blurb can make you bump your head into the receptionist desk. Tea bags everywhere, the softest herbal pendulum. The fungi in mating yeast, hiccups that won’t rest, the incestuous spices all resemble thieves reproducing thieves. Metals in the body, metabolism combustion. Vintage as the love machine, as 3D printer veal, some meatsuits cannot be cleansed. Index of carnivores, all alphabetically shamed. The page numbers self-italicize like cilantro under the tongue. Like wildfires, more WIFI is coming. Another meal cooked so it won’t go bad, another book written before the author goes mad. Point of view simply a politically correct toss up, neo bake sale versus conservative cookout, two carrots on two (only) slightly different sticks both used to beat the skin off dead ideas. Ever see a paradigm peeling a thought, up close? It’s the hardest solo a red, brown and orange scab can perform before becoming text, a strangely textured fuzzy persimmon. This pain has nothing to ride but its own echo, veganism at the stake of staving off dementia. Ginger root all around the nausea of the first book you ever read. It’s an odd memory, mortal as the primordial slime of mayonnaise, this period of the abundance of publications. Attempting to change the world, many elder authors choose to fast––no solicitations, no submissions, no anthologized ions, their blood oranges no longer offering the fiction of its life supportive, red pulp. I studied the stars, the coal mines, the tombs of the skulls of long-lost biographies, my own map of ripped scripts, but where did all those White writers, mostly academic Brits, go when it was time for me to bathe in the original European stations of Blackness? It was us. You are us. We were there first. I make a mean brown rice dish I call Beethoven’s Notes. I read and eat then write the re-eating but find myself alone, too often, at night when the easy books open like sandwiches. The difficult ones, pomegranates. If there was a middle, I’d milk it. Because dreams need co-stars, I’d eat the whole bed with me in it, reading, preferably a mystery of chili or a soupy whodunnit. Rooftop sharecropping, a soundtrack. Work Songs like the hard rain drops of Chinese apples. Footnotes of granola before trail mix was a dormitory favorite. Sloppy thinking, the mid semester munchies of even sloppier feeling. Hook up with a good book just to feel loved then shelve the breakup. Colonial Literature; let’s remember it as a flammable fertilizer. Celery so transcendental it could lightweight-shove peanut butter into the mouth of a library lion without losing a single green branch. A Frankfurt School pun on a bun, the critical theory that states Crisco contains the marinade known as mRNA, the fiery protein makers of bookbinding, wooden awl, and glue brush. Jabbed or not, it’s all Jabberwocky in a Wok, one of Lewis Carroll’s word puzzles tossed like a word salad, the gourmet twister of stolen tarts, the recipe that delivers us to the hokey pokey. And just like that, the kitchen becomes a photographic studio where pair bonding is prepared on a sheet of red paper. And the chef, no longer a very public poet, is now a master fact-checker. No more grilled judges, no more Air Fryer neuromancer. No Cheez Whiz or wax. Rounding up masculine realism like bunched spinach, barely solved the bug problem and killed the crops.

A cat walks across the counter, a black cat with a black nose. A very loud cat, loud at the door, loud splashing in the tub, loud on the bed when he wants me to play with him and his cat toy, a library lion (a real one with a litter box of real dirt) so I named him Song. Strongest book guardian I have ever known; jumped out of the third-floor window twice and survived, not a single whisker bent or broken. He has a sister. Something of a critic, she has a pink nose and a high-pitched meow. Her belly is an orb, his is oblong. She watches as he walks along the counter. If it moves it’s his, if it doesn’t its counterfeit. There is a soft, mustard colored modern chair on top of the refrigerator. Form follows fridge, freezer follows function. Iron, the feline line break on the kitchen’s periodic table. The chair fits because its legs have been removed. Her culinary seat. Her name is Soul, and she likes to watch me cook but more than anything, she loves being brushed. One of her legs is black, the other white––both legs matter. Song, on the other hand, loves to watch me write, enjoys shoulder rides, and having his photograph taken. One of his inner ancestors taught him how to show-strut like a horse. Soul, on the other hand, has no love for the camera. She prefers the cool sink bowl and the dryer drum, especially during fireworks. I found them on very hot day in an alley under a truck, nearly three weeks old. I call these two tuxedoes, the Furs. Hang on to that, “the Furs,” in case it reenters the frame, in case I retake the photograph, as a writer would, my inner Sōseki shedding like stuffing. As kittens they loved to climb and sleep in trees. Both times Song went out the window, Soul woke me. Tap, tap, tap, paw to nose. She is her brother’s keeper, the Fur of Reason. Her whiskers fish above every lick, the antennae of catch and release, pâté no longer her favorite forcemeat. Because punctuation is grooming, one cleans the other’s head with a clean comma. Pets, of course, are just a preface––brother and sister, male and female, the broth of the most recent brew, the first whistle of the kettle, book 1 and book 2. Raspy as scratch pad writing, every fiber of the old prayer rug is mocked by the mint plant pretending to be catnip. It’s all there in the photograph once you are familiar with the cook.

Like a good stockpiler of unprocessed life expectancy, I keep the color film in the meat keeper, the sliding drawer in the refrigerator. Each roll, the color of cinnamon and cocoa, unrolls like a scroll from one side of the camera to the other when I lift the little black cannister and pull its partially exposed tongue. Not one of the rolls has been written on, not by light, not by a muse with a fetish for leaping into the bathtub shaped lens at midnight, not by folly. Aside from the exterior of the brown eggs in the carton, film is the blankest thing in the refrigerator. In fact, its baldness is uniquely alien, the opposite of a human fingerprint. When the meat keeper is full, I use the crisper. Like lettuce, the leaves of celluloid keep longer that way. If I knew at what temperature film freezes, if film freezes, I wouldn’t tell you––not here in the gut-mind of a merciless appetite for picture perfect comfort food. I’d say, “Let’s detox oxygen,” but I wouldn’t tell you a damn thing about camera climate, the active terror in bacteria. I cook like me, no recipe. Every reference is free of memory. A sacred chem-ministry protects the film from the possibility of a color revolution. Name something, I dare you, more post-Communist than Kodak. Numerous rolls forced into behaving like stripes on a flag, strips of bacon above a Confederate campfire. I watched it burn till I could name the smell: plastic tobacco. It rose then exhaled mist, as if a cloud. So many images, the lines in my face are the same lines in my mirages. Historically, I come from a family of sprockets. The camera must like your hands. Loading cold film into the back of a metal camera, the chill of icing trying to warm a cake. Your hands must treat your camera like a birthday. The negative weighs what it weighed before aiming hitched eyes to it. Minced by the camera, this is what becomes of a soul in Shepherd’s pie. The reflection of the sun, which one, crossing water. All its flaws are thawed in search of purpose. No perp walks through the cottage in purple. Held up to light, the inhabitants of the negative look like shadows that haven’t eaten or worshipped since they were framed. In Venice, near the Rio de Malcanton, a feeder canal tried to swallow me, my camera, and my manuscript. My destiny was almost a verb. When I became a grocer of images and words, I was warned, “Art is a passion fruit.” Books about the bad guys fighting themselves, I got rid of those first. I am not a researcher. I am a creator. As I cook, the research surrenders.

Leaked to the surface, the cupboard library is hidden but not a mystery school or an artificial bank vault. Not one of the titles has ever been coin bitten. Unlike traditional bookshelves, I can close the cabinets and forget they are there, escape that construct, shut out the supernatural vocabularies, specifically the double voiced paupers of recent antiquity. Lately the small photography books and books by architects have been speaking with the most maturity, the most open of menus. Libraries should have Happy Hours. Mustard is my grudge, so no signed books are allowed in the cupboards as I do not want any of the titles to mistake themselves for government documents. Lowlife declarations, articles, and treatises. They are books, nothing else, not alive, not humanity’s replacement, not manipulative headstones for the bored. Not a fair use Fahrenheit. The gods who pound, “Show don’t tell!” into the realm of writing have never fallen in love with a camera whose one reminder was being fat used to be rare. According to class, the collars change: blue to white like the cabbage heads of commission structure, a usury so soft it froths. Now we nod to the infamy of papyrus bonfires because our stoves are electric not gas. We see the lens lifting; we see the camera nodding back. Burn a word and it becomes a political thriller, the rock dove’s fat quills. Like sticks of butter in a box, books love being next to books they don’t agree with. For instance, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy has nothing good to say about The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. Sometimes, in search of a few long beans to braid, I twist the titles until I have invented a new logic, a fingerling pasta. Like cooking rice in a bag, angel hair is a hoax. Cyber food truck, smart dust. Sprinkle the photograph with the same scansion once used above lines of poetry then watch it fall onto the print like salt and pepper. The other condiments must wait for the war on genre to subside. It will be a while. Nothing in the cupboard is electric, no electric vehicles, no digital colonialism (not yet), appliance nor app. “Reading,” agrees the oven rack and door of the mind, “is a form of voltage.” No member of the mentally rich will ever deny this: the bait that delivers even the most Whitmanesque of crooners to exotic tech is funkier than cumin. In the cupboard, there’s no book holier than the one transcribed from the nourishment of pure curiosity. “What a nerdy storage space,” my dinner guest says, “Is it a Little Free Library like the ones outside of cafes and houses?” Organized according to categories of digestive health, ease of consumption, not grammatical pedigree, the dead things I drag from the freezer, seemingly well kept, all become leatherbound editions.

An inventory not as representative of population as it was once forced to be, the people who live their lives according to what’s written and typed on paper wilt faster than wordplay. Frontispiece peace sign, a pea shooter aimed at literary wrongdoing. A pod of pond frauds, immune support bottled like asafoetida, the devil’s dung of gum resin. However, the photographs in On Reading by Hungarian photographer André Kertész all tastes like figs, the filling in the version of the bible baked into amazing visual miracles, elderly and teardrop shaped. In one, a boy is sitting on a pile of newspapers eating ice cream and intently reading the funnies. Kertész has captured him using the stick of ice cream as a magnifying glass or a microphone he must ignore if he chooses to read instead of sing. In another, a circus performer, perhaps between performances, is stretched out on a bench reading a book. He is backstage and while we cannot see the name of the book, the photograph invites not just our curiosity but our competitive sense of intellectual incompleteness. Kertész has created reading-envy. Above him the costumes hang like thought bubbles. The long shadow beneath the bench is suggestive of missing limbs. The photograph was taken in New York City in 1969, so (if I had to guess) I would say he is reading fiction, a novel, either Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin or One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, both published two years prior. Those of us who love books, those of us who are always asking strangers what they are reading, must undo books, the new religion of what’s become of them. We must prevent the glory from becoming just another allegory, just another garbage disposal of cleverness wrapped in cellophane; one with a stacked ending, standing in sinking scholarship, all brought about by the lack of lending kindness to our neighbors, the non-readers. The whole stingy, stankin’ lackadaisical hull, more white faces to research than black. Ain’t nothing wrong with being lazy if laziness does not get in the way of the righteous angles of thinking, or the scene one creates when offended by the cultural box office. I picked that book up, by mistake, three times yesterday all because it smelled like hog maws. No rosemary glossary, no thyme for stocks and photographs of undressed salads. I went to bed early and hungry, a bellyful of choice memories, miscues, and rose early like the engine steam that makes poetry the heartbreaking foe of railroad stations, the kiss that says goodbye to a century. The long coats of winter, the embrace of loss through the lens of short-lived infatuation, a vertebra bent backwards, limbs moving like the dance of desire, the dissolving daylight photography wants for all pasture raised heartbreaks unable to escape the “farm squealer’s” hug. If we had only known tradition (as we were served it) was full of nothing but This, That and the Other, we would have only stocked plant-based books, paginated foods and fructose photos.

In his mind, ahead of the thunderous shutter, Bill Brandt saw the rainswept matrix, his lens so close to the feet they became enormous stones hiding the woman they belonged to. The first photographic missing person. Ball of foot in light, in shadow, nearly a heel and glowing toes. From “Catch Point” to “Bookmakers,” Brandt shared the impoverished squares of the checkerboard beneath humanity. Visually, he shaped poached silhouettes and made semi abstract nude custards at a time when poetry was king and neither rhymed. To Go Orders, Victorian as calf ear fritters, Broxy, and jellied eels, drastically cropped and retouched to prevent the eye from starvation. A man pushing an old bicycle, a skeletal ram, up a dirt road. The path behind him, the tail of a tale. The sack is just the right size to gain the earth’s trust. In our time, he works for Door Dash. In his time, he is a testament between difficult deliveries between difficult wars. In both worlds, our poem, and his photograph, he is leaving the big bang, the cosmology of crêpes, off-the-grid griddle and savory galette, the black hole within an even blacker pay off. A bookie with a habit due to a variety of odds and spreads. Brandt knows this and knows the man does not know this. The man only knows the weight of the sack––which may be food, which may be cameras, which may be books. A woman scrubs a boy so hard, he’s out for the count. As viewers, we can almost hear the ringside bell where there is no bell because the match against filth is, pictorially, as ongoing as it is both without sound and motionless. Moon, hurry up and choose one of the false, flat bodies. Do not fall into the upturned hat; it’s a reincarnation trap. Wherever there is a reflection in Brandt’s photographs, the otherworld presents the poetry of the non-dreamer. Be it shadow, smoke or the kismet of delusional fog. The world behind the train pulling out of the station will always be an uncertain one of Metro sleepers; the tracks have no choice but to curve across the difficult chapters of life inserting junctions, jails and forgotten journeys. For what was once called breakfast, I took pictures from the cupboard: eggs, a flaky spinach pie, chicken and apple sausage, plantains, and hot black tea laced with mint leaves, fresh garlic, lemon, honey and two drops of iodine with kelp. Because books belong to no one, not really, I lost my way in those cabinets where the typefaces, unlike photographic ink, had become one continuous feast. It’s the same with words. Many have been dragged through so much false muck that the current creative clergy refuses to pronounce, include, or write them. Once you think a word, it becomes organic fabric, food. Once you say it, you’ve digested it and prepared it to be consumed by the world, food. After you write it, it’s a phase of waste, both meaningless and medicinal, but a phase of waste nonetheless as disposable as any usage, food. Full of the fibrous tear drops of pulp, the opposite is true of profanity. Like photography, it sheds. We were poor so I taught myself to read like a fork, listen like a spoon, and write like a knife––sleep eating through most of my dinning while pillaging every morsel. Betrayed readers cutting the heads off fish and chickens, the trivet beneath the trivium was not worth kissing. Composed in the kitchen as if it were a violent viewfinder, if I could see the blood, I refused to consume it.

A well-placed swear, curse word or cussin’ out contains more preservatives than packaged ready-to-eat-meals. Telling someone they are full of shit has a more lasting effect on their daily breadth than feeding them ramen before an exam. Ask any linguist, linguini is not the logic you think it is. There are supplements beneath insults, the vitamins that contain vitriol make the slim volumes swell like old phone books. These new humans, their ears do not pop when they blow their noses. See them jog. They run like robots. See them read. The words move across their faces like data. For a flock of followers, they’d scam ham. Their Bok choy lacks joy, the bladeless clusters. Something’s missing from the social lunchbox, their leafless logins. All the seeds have been removed from the fruit by the sustainable clique, every semester a jester. Something’s being left out of the literature, the photographs they take with their phones enter the world like photocopies of conversations. A lack of lead tones in the color, sustenance has lost its music. There’s an empty, plastic bottle where there was once a bookmobile of botany, photographs of exquisite tea-ware no longer look good on silver-plated oval platters. When I open a book, it’s time to cook. Nibble, forage, nosh. My only apron is a blank journal. I’m not a big fan of refrigerator magnets. I want to be frozen then fried alive, the agony and ecstasy of unknowable temperatures. Set ablaze in pages like one of those cult members who favors cold cuts over the cancer cells of cancel culture. Without qualities, like Vienna sausage, viands, vivers and vittles in vile defective cans. All around us are hyper consumptive food and drug rituals disguised as administrations and healthy public programs. It’s as if we grew up in a gourd, squashed by cheap animation and the perfectly staged food groups that are always onstage. Breakfast sang-along with the hypnosis of Saturday mornings. Our favorite course, school lunch, made sure we were just healthy enough for indoctrination. Dinner delivered the family to television and television delivered the family to the inhouse picnic known as programming. Our diet proves we are no more than temporary nature––sharing shelf lives and expiration dates with the well-fed dead who eat whatever we eat, whatever we see, whatever we read. One day our hearts, like electric Wurlitzers, will perish from abbreviation. Kitchens come and go, come and go, come and go like mess halls. The human hunt for other humans is our most humiliating encore. Slabs of fatback echo, more types of keyboards than felt tip pens in our origin story of famines. Book cover dust jacket, the marketing of knowing less about long green cow moolah than any author. Commander-in-chef, a chief. Commander-in-chief, a non-native head of cheese, a weaponized freak. Every time you open a can of real beings, a poem should pop out. If it does not, the can is no good. Photography is not public opinion. Get the shot and ignore the polls. So hungry for books we eat authors, so hungry for authors we eat culture, so hungry for culture we eat each other. Time for a new picture of the Photo Laureate’s Kitchen, another cupboard of storage, the stork of closing acts, one where creativity is not controlled by faucets, where hidden pipes don’t bronze cut or slow dry the underworld. Sink hose, a snake of saints, the sins committed by women and men who prefer to breastfeed television over climbing into the cupboard and abducting an old book. Instead of Photo Laureate, a friend called me the Photography Lawman. The first time I heard it, I laughed like a bag of dark, perennial plums, cyanide pits in the pokey. Thankful for drain stoppers and the mini steel wool tumbleweeds, no cook has ever pepper sprayed a congregation just to install an island. The food of greedy geniuses, Pro Tools for savage marauders. The flat, rubbery head of a pancake flipper was once the fourth most important part of a fish. Every book has joints, a body and a spine that remembers, if nothing else, which trees to soundcheck. Rehearsal, stimulant, frequency. As food becomes more fake, books become less real. Pan drawer for nonstick instructions and other political prisoners such as out-of-print skillets, forthcoming bans, and old lenses. An infinite worktop to tune milk and honey. If there’s no sun in the food, no pastedown, the cupboard books will all die.

Folkcal Fraim 15

The Photo Laureate's Kitchen

Life on the Exhale: Victoria Amelina

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