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Waypoints

An Online Literature and Art Journal

Septembris

Who flattens the loaves of emmer for breakfast, the jentaculum? Salted slightly,
the round loaf still warm is slipped in the cool milk of the September borne.

I crack two eggs, whisking them both with brittle cuts of asparagus. They bubble
in the hot pan while the fried chips await the drip of the salsa de tomatillos,

green with a hint of salt. There is the daily rhythm of the meal with the foods
of the seasons.  The ninth month of the Christian calendar is one of bounty.

The Elder Pliny chronicled the many types of olives like the arbequina with no
nipple. Spherical in shape, it pairs well with goat cheese, a sheep feta. It is

the time of chiles en nogada in Oaxaca. Pomegranates, walnuts and rain.
September.  I was born in this month. Not the hottest 26th day on record nor

the coldest in Cincinnati. Like the Padrón pepper, some years it is hot
and others it’s not, or Los pimientos de Padrón, unos pican y otros no

while some return to the plow, to the wheat after they win their awards, their
wars, all cannot be Cincinnatus. I am the one who never went home.

 

Alice Jennings is a student in the MFA Program in Writing at Spalding University. Her poetry has appeared in In Other Words: Merida, Hawai’i Review, Penumbra, The Louisville Review, and is forthcoming in Boyne Berries and First Literary Review East. She is the recipient of the U.S. Poets in Mexico 2013 MFA Candidate Award.