Grand Dinner Party MenuThe Cooling Viscous Party-Piece
My Irish strangerWhom they’re calling an aunt
Prepares a cave
From crystallised sugar.
Treacle would be less aggressively sweet…
Gushing
Outside of
the mouth of a cake.
A lion will open his
hole full of teeth.
and give life to a
berry-flavoured whisper.
With a soft purr of cream,
Pure, indolent and smitten
with a compliment of green
Heartfelt and tipsy
In the lull of a festival
a fly lands on the tablecloth
a small child passes
Eyeing up the spoils.
And we feel like pirates
Caught by a bored fisherman
Given a new stomach to fill
and left to our revelling.
by Peter Buckley
Secret Summer Rendevous
Closing my eyes, the sun on my faceI inhale through my nose and...I can breathe.
The air is salty and filled with gull screams,
here on the pier, my other life elsewhere.
When we met last year I had the lobster,
succulently hot with butter dripping down
bright orange claws, beckoning me to
passionately rip through shell.
He had the pasta tantalising the tongue
with fragrant leaves of basil and monkfish tail.
He twirled the taglietelle round his fork
expertly manipulating soft oily ribbons.
This year we're sharing; a large salad
crisp with lettuce and celery, an aphrodisiac
(so I'm told), oysters sliding erotically down
through expectant throats to yearning stomachs.
We'll follow with a fruit salad, strawberries
being my favourite; heart shaped juicy morsels
drenched in thick, gloopy cream. The last hurrah
for two men who live with women who hate fish.
by K J Lander
Pasta with Monkfish Kebabs