Tuesday, October 7, 2008

I heart you.

My heart is in my throat.

These are my favorite cookies at Fortunato Brothers in Brooklyn. I know they're piled with sugar, but they're not cloyingly sweet. They're just right.

Love yourself. Do not save the red, heart-shaped cookies for Valentine's Day.

Now, because it's Poetry Tuesday, here's another angsty teen poem (written by me when I was a genuine teen)!

This one appears to be a try at a sestina - and I chose it because it is, in part, actually about eating heart-shaped cookies in the grass. Which would be a good place to eat the Fortunato hearts pictured above.


On an earthly picnic policed by the sun,
grass grasped the sky in its fist
where a girl sat still with the face of a cloud
eating cookies shaped like her heart.
The shade was donated by willow-trees
that previously only allowed the bird

to fly there. But there was no sign of a bird
on the ground, in the shrubbery, or riding the sun
where it couldn't be touched by the trees.
With only crumbs left of the treat in her fist,
she brushed them off the fabric over her heart
and noticed the shape of a cloud.

A sudden gust had whipped the cloud
into cream that flew in the shape of a bird
to the girl, who put her hand over her heart
and saluted the art of the sun.
A passing breeze thought the hand was a fist
and alerted an alarm of trees.

Rattling in a frenzy, the trees
leaped up to scrape the errant cloud
and close it into a white-misted fist,
aimed to fly through her hair as a bird
does more than a bat - who never sees the madness in the sun.
The girl felt that soon her heart

would burst. But body knows the heart
is stronger sometimes than the trees
(that break appendages in ice and winter sun)
And under a wind-birthed cloud
that whistled shrill destruction like a bird --
only harder and more feathered than a flying fist --

the young woman shook out her hair - and her fist
was raised in a prayer near her heart,
then higher, as if it was the child of a bird.
She stretched her spirit to the trees,
placed her voice in a cloud,
and blew out the sun.

A bird had fallen out of the trees;
it was the shape of her fist - or her heart.
The vacuum where the sun had been became clouds.

(circa 1994)

2 comments:

houstonmacbro said...

This is kinda off the subject, but do you take the photos? The food always looks so amazing.

Jennette said...

Don't mind being off the subject. I excel at off the subject! I do take the photos, with a handful of exceptions. I try to give credit in the posts in which the photos aren't mine. Thanks! I'm always trying to take better pictures.

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