Levi Poems

Here's sophomre Levi Calveri's poem, after eating a shitake mushroom and facing his mushroom fear:

Mushrooms,
I ignored you every day of my life,
passing you by,
not knowing the immense loss
growing every time I rejected you.

But I’m trying to change.
I know I was wrong.
I never noticed your smooth brown color.
Texture so soft--submitting yourself
to my teeth and taste buds.

It’s hard to be ignored
and suddenly loved.
I was a coward.

Enjoying you now:
a way for me to say sorry.

Signed,

Your Secret Admirer

Sofi Poems

Junior Sofi Adams' onion poem:

Ode to an Onion

An onion can glow, illuminate itself from within,
incandescent with sweet and savory potential.

Lo and behold
a living white orb
can be
chopped
diced
quartered
canned
powdered
pickled
sliced
into anything from a
rainbow
to
disks
cubes
leaves:

leaving nothing but a thinner-than-paper crust
floating across the counter top.

Impossibly sweet and delicate if slowly simmered in butter
reaching the perfect point of carmelization.


Caramelized Onion
Caramelized Onion Bulb
Caramelized Onion Orb

Unmatchable

Meticulously placed layers hugging, cocooning
one another,
crisply separate
crushing outward
spritzing droplets of onion sap
along wrists, fingers, and the table.

Saturating
metal
textile
plastic
skin
with strong onion love.

Jasmine Poems

This food poem was written by hipster Jasmine Rudolph, freshwoman at Walden School.

Industrial Food

I am supposed to write a poem about food

But how can I,

The girl that grew up

On Tyson Chicken Nuggets, Kraft Mac n' Cheese,

Stand a chance

Against all of these liberal students

Speaking of such sophisticated foods

In such a nonchalant manner.

How can I not feel intimidated

When they speak of Italian gelato, mole from San Miguel?

I grew up with Tweety-bird Popsicles and Taco Bell.

They say to write about what you know.

Well this is what I don’t know.

*

When you eat gelato

are you thinking about the taste,

just waiting to get home and fill in the blanks

of the description category

for your food blog?

Or are you like me,

thinking of nothing

but how good the cold sticky

mound of chemicals on a stick

feel dripping off of my chin?

By the time you receive your mole

at your hip, backstreet Mexican restaurant

how do you take the time to memorize

and savor every flavor?

By the time I pull into the Taco Bell drive-through window

I could practically eat the wrapping around my 90¢ beef burrito.

They may say to write about what you know,

but I can write so much more about what I don’t.