Faith

I pass from one moment to the next thinking only of food, of sustenance and creation. I dream of new flavors, textures and aroma, envision techniques for transformation as I pass silver garlic presses and stark white immersion blenders. I scour cupboard and grocery aisles for sharp spice profiles, rounded bellies of sweet miracles yet unbirthed from oven. In the course of a day I am a traveller, humbled, awed. Each meal transports me to India, Turkey, Argentina, Senegal or Morocco. In Savannah, I tasted evaporating campfire pork, a recipe passed down from a time older than the word chef, and bathed in the Louisianna bayou as steam rose from a bowl of turnip greens. In Los Angeles, Cantonese fusion street food reduced me to my knees, panting and salivating at their pulpit, wide-eyed at visions of light-streaked skies in a future China that almost exists. I watched the food truck disappear around a corner to deliver its gospel to another parking lot full of expectant time travellers, willing converts. After each meal is consumed and the visions have faded, dissipated into memory, I cannot believe I've had enough by the end of it. I have seen countless countries, peoples, pasts and futures through tongue and teeth, lips and nose, through saliva. To experience cooked flesh of fish transformed to butter as its moved across hard range of ridges on roof of mouth, to digest in fading sunlight where silhouettes of powerlines merge with mountains purpled by the passage of another day is psalm, is prayer, is the denial of death, the truest form of faith.

Thank Yous and All Apologies

Hi folks,

I'd like to thank everyone who has visited the site and read the interviews with Charlene Luck and Darrel Holnes, and, of course, a big thanks to those two inspiring writers. For everyone who's dealt with my sporadic updates as of late, an especially big ups to you - I'm not making more frequent postings a New Years resolution, but I will do my best in the next year to post something each month, poetry-related or not.

As 2013 draws to a close, my thoughts are occupied with reminiscence and that nagging "I wish I'd done more" B.S., but I can't help but think of the future. It's been a big year for the blog, and this next year is pregnant with epic possibilities and I'm excited and a little frightened of what may come. If you enjoyed the interviews, I am lining up a few more authors for interviews for a spring feature, and I am kicking around the idea of creating a sister site dedicated exclusively to the business side of writing sometime this summer. I'll keep everyone posted if that latter idea comes to fruition.

In the meantime, please enjoy a re-write of "Nomadic Tongue", a poem posted here back in September. I hope the holiday season was kind to all of you, and I hope you are all still inspired and warmed by writing as I am.

Humbled,

Alexander Lloyd Johnson