Category Archives: Poetry

Just add water.

Supposably. I don’t believe it. Not one shred of it. What became of the pig, the dirt, the water, the time, the life-taking, the blood, the cutting, the HAM?

Just add bread.

Reading Hemingway

by James Cummins

Reading Hemingway makes me so hungry,

for jambon, cheeses, and a dry white wine.

Cold, of course, very cold. And very dry.

Reading Hemingway makes some folks angry:

the hip drinking, the bitter pantomime.

But reading Hemingway makes me hungry

for the good life, the sun, the fish, the sky:

blue air, white water, dinner on the line . . .

Had it down cold, he did. And dry. Real dry.

But Papa had it all, the brio, the Brie:

clear-eyed, tight-lipped, advancing on a stein . . .

Reading Hemingway makes me so hungry,

I’d knock down Monsieur Stevens, too, if I

drank too much retsina before we dined.

(Too old, that man, and way too cold. And dry

enough to rub one’s famished nerves awry,

kept talking past the kitchen’s closing time!)

Reading Hemingway makes me so hungry . . .

And cold, of course. So cold. And very dry.

“Reading Hemingway” by James Cummins, from Portrait in a Spoon. © University of South Carolina Press, 1997.