four dream menus for the midwest summer
I am lucky to work with food because it becomes love so easily. After earning a BA in 2012, I began to work in food as a way to support my practice, which I thought of as painting and drawing. After an accident and a surgery, I cooked a lover and her friends a many-course meal, responding to a series I made of blue ink weights on paper. The separation between food and art never stayed clean after that. I get antsy in a white cube anyway. I love surfaces, but I want to touch them.
When I am cooking or imagining food, I think about choreography and poetics. The way some sensations seem to ring together. Sense-making, the urge to decorate. At a residency in Berlin, I created a lunch kitchen based on synesthetic-poetic interviews. What is the color of your sadness?, I would ask. Do you want this meal to be an incantation, an exorcism, or an invocation?
It is possible to build relations with food making and food sharing, gestalt and community bodies. Love is in the air, survival, pleasure. During the height of Covid, I hosted a two-person cafe based on the desire to swim with friends, share water, and touch. I served the participants through glass. Pop radio and videos of the lapping lake leaked through.
I am very interested in how the body tangles with thought and knowledge. I’m very interested to shift from argumentation and nutrition towards augmentation, fiction, and beautiful language. I know history saturates everything. I know we don’t escape nutrition, but we can decorate.
Three years after moving to Chicago, I am saturated by the food and the water (lake, ice, thunder). I am finding friends like Mary Eleanor at Tusk and Emily Sher at Rainbow Wines, who are interested in building social spaces and making space for sense. At the Poor Farm Experiment, I have been lucky to meet artists like Mark Jeffreys and Elena Ailes, who encounter the somatic, emotional, and sculptural as entangled, and who welcome food into the mix. It’s 2022, and it’s starting again—the ability to be around food together, and to laugh open- mouthed near a friend. No bets on forever, but rot has always been around. I’m so here for it, and I’m so glad to be here, for it, too.
i. buzzing
Are sitting round the table, are outside, are knees pressed close, open. We bare-legged, bare-backed. A little loose in the joints and beaded, smelling, joking. A humming mounts under our words. They go for the wrists first. Ankle, under knee, ear. Little welts rise and fall with our tones. Blue air spreading. We don’t eat much: some melon. We exclaim. Our blood together is flown off in small packages, to the breeze or bricks, or are caught smack, table, cloth, and palm. The moon comes up; we murmur under.
moon
one green melon, cut into unmanageable chunks
community feeling
a single wasa cracker burnt to ash, mixed with honey served on fingers for food
blue air
sorrel and purslane, hard-boiled and wet-shaped into a loose cake leaking
nibbled
the abandoned skin of the earlier melon rubbed over the inside of each wrist
a lukewarm cup of barley tea for sipping
ii. two smokes
In this menu, you are alone and on a beach. It has been a long day on and with the water. In the sand, a hole; in the hole, a fire, clicking to itself. A blue thing appears, a green thing, un-obvious hot clear colors perforate. Text a friend to say I love you, let's get fries when I get home. Slowly drink in the image of a cloud. Take one perfect cigarette, sip in a curl of smoke just after you cup a small flame, feel the fire in the corner of your thigh, billowing lightly.
hole
polenta cooked in a little dry, ceramic mug placed, in the middle of the mug tangled spiky sticks to touch while you spoon polenta into your mouth
a blue thing a green thing brightly
chervil and parsley popsicle, warm brown kombucha
cigarette
cigarette
fries
fries
iii. big blur
This is a big one, you can feel that in the lead up. There’s nothing much to do but say yes to everyone coming on over, wipe your hands over your favorite book, and find a page that fits: something with sauce, for a crowd. Earlier in the morning you were covered in water; now you are covered in song. The radio on the way to the store, the store sprinkled in ring tones as you pick out a salad, the three other houses tightest around your house. Their radios choir together as you spin the chicken in the heat. Everyone arrives, and you build another sound together all night, even when you are alone again.
ringtones
frozen raspberries, taglietti al dente, very young olive oil mixed
sauce
a sauce made from the easiest vegetable currently, cooked down for an hour, broken nicely
a quarter cup of cream added at the end, mixed loosely and covered with fresh dill
choir
jasmine-scented marshmallows poked through with dried grass and fresh grass, a burnt match
iv. lakeday
For being inside of water together in a type of sun that just seems to reach and reach and reach. Imagine a light that pulls you in, liquid through and through. Bright under, bright over. Spilling cannonballs and heat waves all day. Misty-eyed and gorgeous, baby.
the light from the water bouncing on the rough wall in the morning
ground pollen under chilled sliced celery, nasturtium leaf, celery syrup
a slick dive into a brisk cool lapping
good olive oil, ripe tomato, ume boshi, cold fennel juice
trees waving over your angles near low water and late sun
salty pickled mustard greens in thin whey porridge with a raw broken yolk
loosely slipping under
cold barley tea, basque cider, iced shiitake broth, someone's tongue
after on the warm rocks
warm butter rice with soy sauce, a pile of fresh shaved corn
one burnt globe of apricot preserve served inside of a plum
