"A Leek Haiku" from Gather + Leek Risotto + a Video

In the latest issue of Gather Journal, a small haiku was tucked away on the bottom corner of page 45. Turn the page too quickly, or fix your gaze on the potato and leek tart it was paired with, and it would have been easy to miss the haiku entirely. But when I noticed it there like a crumb on the page, I knew it needed to be here, too.

A Leek Haiku

By Fiorella Valdesolo

Onion it is not.
Slender. Mild. Ribbons and roots.
Beauty in a stalk.

From Gather Journal, Fall/Winter 2013

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"Cutting Thyme" by Linda Parsons Marion + Fried Eggs with Herb Oil

After some time away, it always takes a day or so to reestablish myself in the kitchen. Although the refrigerator is usually lacking some ingredient I need or crave, the thought of trekking to the store minutes after unpacking never feels like a worthwhile endeavor. Let it wait until tomorrow.

What follows the arrival, the mail sorting, the laundry starting, the opening windows to let some fresh air in, and the dog walking, is the question of what to eat. Having decided against going to the store, and tired of eating out, I'm left with a few choices that can be made from the pantry, plus anything else that survived our week away in the refrigerator.

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"The Residency" by David Yezzi + Scrambled Eggs with Red Pepper Puree

We creative types need to stick together, don't we? There's nothing better that knowing you are part of a community of like-minded people who get inspired and excited by the same things that drive you. When I started blogging in 2008, I was unaware of the community I was entering, and that I would actually make genuine friendships from it. I thought about all this because of two things: a poem and a magazine article. Though unrelated, the poem happened to be placed in the middle of an article about loneliness in the age of social media. The poem is about a writer's residency, and the experience of communing with other artists in a somewhat isolated environment, in this case, in the woods, in a cabin with a writing table.

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"Boy and Egg" by Naomi Shihab Nye + Creamy Scrambled Eggs

When I was in college, I once heard Naomi Shihab Nye give a reading and remember thinking how confident she was. Not in a loud, overbearing way, but she just stood in her poems so strongly, the way roots go down into the earth and support the large tree branches above it. Her voice had a certain quietness, but each word was spoken with a strength like she knew she had painstakingly chosen every word and placed them on the page just so, and that each word was exactly right.

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"Baskets" by Louise Gluck + Winter Market Salad

It's a somewhat sorrowful beginning, so I apologize I couldn't start the year with a more sprightly piece. There is, however, beauty in the sadness, so much in fact, that the speaker asks the question directly, "How much beauty / can a person bear?"

You'll hear that word a lot here. Speaker. It might seem like the writer and the speaker are interchangeable, but I assure you they are not. It's one of the first lessons I learned in my graduate school workshops. The person sitting across from you may have written the poem, but you can't make assumptions. In some cases, of course, they are the same person, but to maintain some consistency for the sake of discussion, the speaker will be speaking and the writer will be writing.

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