ManicDDaily

In my ongoing exploration of online writing and poetry sites, I am participating today in Magpie Tales, a site, hosted by Tess Kincaid, that sets up an interesting picture prompt. The picture was a photograph of skewered ducks hanging in a Chinese restaurant, before a slightly smiling cook. (I like to use my own art work where possible so have done my own copy of it above.)

Here’s the poem:

At a Restaurant On Mott

There is something about the Chinese,
at least when it comes to
restaurants, that does not consider
Ping (the little white duck
of my childhood who wafted
paper-lantern-like down an
unscrolled Yangtze river, among
junks of pen, ink, watercolor.)

There is something that smiles
as wide as a ladle, that
gleams with anticipatory,
and unmitigated,
satisfaction
at the sight, for example, of a chicken’s foot
streaming with small galaxies
of golden globules.

There is something that doggedly
digests the dog-eat-dogness of this
world in a way that the limp cartilage of
my vegetarian fingers simply cannot grasp;
a realism as rooted as
galic/ginger/turnips/webbed feet/hooves,
which my Ping-popping
anemia could probably profit from.

Nonetheless, I’ll stick to the tofu.