A Pretty Meal Is Like a Poem-ody

I guess you never quite escape your past, especially if it was verse than your present. For 14 years I stopped writing poetry for a slew of reasons that I'll reduce to my favorite glib one: You can only write the "language is a tool that fails us" poem so many times before you have to at the least convince yourself. Then in November 2011 the last SB Poet Laureate Paul Willis tricked me into writing one by inviting me to take part in a response to an art show. Still, one poem didn't mean that much.

Of course, it's hard to escape poetry in my house, given my wife is the new SB Poet Laureate. She keeps teasing me with assignments, and I can't help but respond as the hack I am--tell me what to do, when it's due, and I do. I'm thinking of it as poetry as journalism, but you can make the facts up.

All this is an intro to my first poem publication of the 21st century. The online food journal (and you knew food was going to show up, didn't you?) Alimentum had a call out for "menupoems" (they print it as a portmanteau), so I decided Downey's was as good a place as any to write my ode about.

You can go read "More Simple" here, about a third of the way down the page. Don't forget to tip your waitresses.