I know a bit about dismemberment, like why it’s necessary. 
Lacking teeth, frogs can swallow fat flies whole, still buzzing, 
while we must grind our food with molars and strong jaws. 
To help us, we make tools, like knives and cleavers, chicken 
shears. How many carcasses have I hacked apart, pulling 
tender meat from chicken thighs and breasts, stripping off 
the skin, dropping the bones and organs into a pot for stock? 
And oh, the juices of ripe melons and oranges, chopped beets 
seeping into the cutting board. To chop bits of red, yellow, purple 
peppers, like elements in a mosaic, the brine of olives, to layer 
flavors, building a holy harmony for eyes and tongue. 

*Publisher’s Note:

“Selections from A Small Book of Questions / after Bhanu Kapil” by Chen Chen in Nat. Brut (Issue 8, Spring 2017):
https://www.natbrut.com/chen-chen

Link was retrieved on 24 December 2022.

Robbi Nester

lives and writes in Southern California, where she is a retired college educator and an elected member of the Academy of American Poets. She curates two poetry reading series and is the author of four published books of poetry, including an ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections: Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014). She has four more manuscripts awaiting publication.

Her poems, reviews, essays, and articles have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including among others: Artemis; Book of Matches; Cultural Daily; Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic (Kent State University Press, 2022); SMEOP (Hot) (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, forthcoming); Live Encounters; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Mindfull; Naugatuck River Review; Rhino; One Art; The Journal of Radical Wonder; Tiferet; Valparaiso Poetry Journal; Verse-Virtual; and Zooanthology: About the Animals in Our Lives (Sweetycat Press, 2022).

Robbi has also edited three anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014); Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees, which was published as a special issue of Poemeleon Journal; and The Plague Papers, recently published online at Poemeleon Journal.

Poet’s website: www.robbinester.net

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Dancing White Egret, ekphrastic poem by Robbi Nester after a photograph by Philippe Rouyer, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022)

⚡ Three Poems by Robbi Nester in Verse-Virtual (January 2020)

⚡ Law of Attraction, ekphrastic poem after Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, in Verse-Virtual (May 2019)

⚡ Night Tunnel, ekphrastic poem by Robbi Nester after a painting by Robert Rhodes, Philadelphia Night Train, in The Ekphrastic Review (21 April 2016)

⚡ The Locusts, ekphrastic poem after a collage of the same name by Mary Boxley Bullington, in The Ekphrastic Review (13 October 2015)