Taste – Yum, Ugh!

Goya's Thanksgiving Dinner

A poet I once knew, now dead, like all good poets, said that she knew he liked a poem by the way the paper on which it was printed tasted. She actually licked paper, then he would turn towards the mirror in the dresser and would stare for hours at her tongue.

She rejected poems by the way they tasted. An unfair approach no doubt, but one that he felt totally comfortable with. “How else to reject?,” she would say. It was all a matter of spice yesterday, salt today, deep hunger tomorrow.

Thus far the editors of Little Emerson have come up with empty stomachs. Thank goodness for the qualifier “little” before Emerson, as expected. Over twenty submissions and nothing, nil, zilch. A lovely, demanding group. That is not to say that some have not approved. Tongue to paper they said “yes”, though rarely and altogether occasionally. The most votes any poem got: four out of nine, thus far. Is this sad? True? Fair? Are all of these folks simply overstuffed? This one is yummy. Or not. But it just so happens that, despite hunger, not all like vanilla ice cream for dessert. Shit! Not all like ice cream at all. Rare. Rare, indeed, like Cronus' meat.