Michael Kerzner

This is untitled. It will always be a beautiful moment for me. A shoulder to lean on when the world is baring down on you. I wish I had a shoulder to lean on right about now. To lean, to cuddle, and to generally be with. I want nothing more.

For Two

I made these today on a whim with some less than yummy winter blueberries that I thought would taste a great deal better if they were cooked. So I pan steamed them in a pool of water, with 2 teaspoons of fresh grated ginger, and a tablespoon of honey. I covered it for the first few minutes so the blueberries would cook, then took the lid off for the liquid to reduce into a syrup. I laid them on a bed of mascarpone cheese, then put a generous dollop of mascarpone in the center, and put my second layer of fruit around the mound of mascarpone like a doughnut; diced apples and a little bit of dried, but still fiery, ginger in a tamarind sauce, with cinnamon. Then I put a very thin layer of mascarpone on the top. Can't wait to try them. Just wish I had someone to share the second one with. And the duo was picture 1,120 on my mom's iPhone, so hopefully we live that long together, eating my yummy, healthy food!

Why?

Today is Martin Luther King's birthday, and in honor of that fact, President Obama, or rather, the person who handles his twitter account, has asked the twitterers to express why they think community service is important. I think community service is an integral part of civic republicanism (in a nutshell, being a citizen of a democracy of elected officials), for a wide multitude of reasons, the most important being to engage in the world and make an impact instead of being part of the problem. This can be as simple as taking the lead in your own home to organize your household's recycling. But it can be as robust as contacting your local officials, and getting the ball rolling on more robust recycling practices if needed. Anyways, that is not what I want to write about here, today, as important as it is to inspire. I write today to ask Why? To shout to the heavens with a great wail as for all to hear the sound of pain that comes from deep down in my soul. Why, America? Why did you savagely murder your beautiful, peaceful, benevolent son? Not a fighter, but a true lover of mankind, and a dove who's outstretched hand was violently broken with the dark rage of white power. This was someone who spoke from deep within the American subconscious to cast out her demons with light and love, and he was silenced. Why? Why do some Americans fear change so extremely? Why is the messenger of that change demonized, when in fact, that is the very creature they wish to eradicate from the American matrix of identity? Now, I can't speak so much on the matter, because frankly, I am no MLK scholar. But I know that he was a peaceful loving man, a pillar of his community, a great source of light, and for all those reasons, I wonder why? With deep anguish, this question resonates in my mind.

Love, love, love......

.......this look on the freshly pixilated Anne Hathaway. The short hair is one thing, and definitely contributes to the look, but only in the sharpest ways, as to refine the bravado inherent in this wildly luscious ensemble. Masculine? Feminine? Fabulous.

Sweet and Sour Roasted Chicken

This past week I finally did what I had been planning to do for a very long while; make a chicken dish with some beautiful dried fruit I bought at an Arabic grocery in Brooklyn. I bought dried plums and cherries from Sahadi's , in Brooklyn Heights on Atlantic avenue. They specialize in dried fruits, as 1/3 rd of the store is devoted to dried fruits and nuts, and they do it very well. Anyways, I made a marinade for the chicken out of these dried fruits with a tomato paste (about 2 1/2 tablespoons) and garlic base (2 tablespoons of minced garlic), 1 teaspoon of turmeric, sour cherry syrup (which has sugar in it, about 2 tablespoons), 3 cinnamon sticks, and just shy of a tablespoon of tamarind paste (be careful using tamarind paste, it is very strong), an 1/3 cup of filtered water. I stewed the marinade for 40 minutes or so, just until one of the cinnamon sticks opened up and released its fragrance. Once it cooled, I smothered the chicken with it, filled the chicken's cavity with the three cinnamon sticks, some rough chopped onion, and some preserved lemon, and let it marinate for 36 hours (I would have made it after 24, but I was busy). right before cooking, I drizzled the whole chicken with olive oil to lock in moisture. Here is my finished product!

One caveat: I roasted this at 450 like all the internet recipes had instructed me to, but with all this fruit, I really should have done it at 350 like my mom does. It made no difference for the chicken, it was moist and amazing, but I lost some fruit which was burnt black, and it was really a shame because some of those cherries plumped up to almost their original size like a dried mushroom does when soaked. Filled with olive oil, and chicken jus, it was an exquisite delight.
I made myself a plate before work one day, to fill myself before my service at the restaurant. I made a little salad to go with it, of chives, thai basil, and some red kidney beans, dressed simply in salt, and the olive oil and chicken jus from the roast (I should have added just a touch of black pepper or sour cherry syrup to the salad for more flavor, but I just didn't. Lazy, blazy, crazy, before work, and just wanting to eat.) Notice, the conspicuous lack of carbs on the plate, with the exception of the small amount of beans. I did this precisely, and deliberately, to avoid food slumber before my evening service.

I loved it, but next time, I have to premarinade my chicken with salt and additional turmeric to prime the bird for the second layer of marinade. You live, you learn.

Royal Bitch

Here is the sister poem for the previous one. I wrote this in a moment of capsizing fear to bring some order to the world, to my life, to it all. It also isn't perfect, but it is quite the explication. Enjoy!

Royal Bitch

Dedication: For all the It-girls of privilege that have entered popular culture as of late. I wish you would be more like this.

She makes fun of the girl who looks a mess
When everyone is wearing their Sunday best
For she is flawless
Not lawless
Pretty in pink
Perhaps, some day, tallest
Perfect and it pains her so
Because beauty is pain
And don't she know

Mother attended Institut Alpin Videmanette
She was the prim and proper coquette
Schooled in the arts of etiquette
She demands the same of her daughters
For those poor in society bore her
And she will not breed insolent indolence for their father
He won’t have it either

So we return to our lady of class
She isn't quite Mother yet, but our virtuous lass
Reluctant to be a daughter of phallocentric privilege
Her eyes have absorbed much
And she is assessing the spillage

Yet
She is a good daughter of tradition
And she will wear it well
That is her joi de vivre
To be both lady, and belle

Educated and refined
Her taste not quite set
She is growing to the praise that her station will beget

But first,
Our thoughtful beauty has some lessons to pass
Feminism
Misogyny
Objectification
She understands these constructs?
Understands their past?
She is learning
Learning how to lift the veil
To see
The androcentrism in old fairy tales
It is not an easy task
For she richly inherits a tradition whose joys she may question
This tried and true
Expanding the dimensions
of her mind
And the reflections
of her heart

For the self she aims to be
Her own objet d'arte

Her mind grows to examine the folly she sees
She is troubled by them who she is subjected to regularly
Even the rejects
The unruly few
For them
She demonstrates with beauty
The virtue
Of delicacy

Male and Female alike she instructs
With hesitancy
She scolds
Isn’t quick
May be bold
But she isn’t cold
And ultimately
In the end
Even she knows

Truth is peripatetic
The middle is excluded
The necessary dialectic

For our Pynchon schooled her
As she cried for her lot
He teaches the masses
What is nasty
What is hot
Our writers
Designers
Leaders
Artists
Those who think in private
But who live in the public
They understand the value of this American diet
They are of it
For
Our Royal bitch who wins it all
Who
Shines
Beams
Glows
At the debutante’s ball

Inventing Bitch

This poem is not perfect. I wrote it a few years ago on a silly whim of feminist pride in my own fabulous self. I forget what prompted it; the world baring down on me! So here it is. It is both too much and not enough at the same time. Yet, due to the urging of my muse, I am posting it for you all. Enjoy!
ps. This is actually a language poem, as are many of my poems, following in the Beat tradition best exemplified by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I am sorry that blogger does not allow for the breaks, pauses, and artful placement of words and phrases, but I think you can still get the beat, it just isn't as pronounced as it would be on the well punctuated page.

Inventing Bitch

Dedication: For all the (would-be) feminists who understand the joys of beauty, and shamelessly revel in them, unabashedly partaking in one of life's greatest pleasures, beauty.


Bitch
Witch
A very high pitch
A scratch you cant itch
No matter which
Hand you employ
I will toy
Cause I'm coy
No ploy
I have to be
In this world of ours
This world so foul
I am a bitch
Beware
I may growl

You may howl
You may writhe
As I wriggle in delight
As I bask in my bitchiness
And invent this sight
For the world that we live in rewards this might
As it squeezes us all to a pulp, nice and tight
I write
May
Fight
On this subject
Of
Gender

Oh, how you penned her
(and him)
Oh how to mend her…..
I will be Bitch
For my gender
A place to begin
I’m not trying to bend her
I’m not trying to “win”
But be her
See her
The happy lady of the land
And as I try to imagine, like a wand in my hand
Her bitchiness
Bitchessa
La Bitch arrives
She shakes her tail
And into the world she dives
She has only one life, and she will live it well
She will dance
She will prance
The puritans can go to hell
For she is W-O-M-A-N
Capital Construct said D
Who will revel in herself
She may allow you to see
What a beautiful Woman she can truly be
She may be a fox
She may fox trot foxy

She will giggle
May wiggle
As you squiggle of her beauty
You don’t do it justice
Don’t honor it
Just do your “duty”
As you shell her
As you sell her
With your ever gazing eyes
You inhumanely swell her
You turn her into lies

She lives it through
She tries to be herself
But at the end of the day
She is not candy on a shelf
Perfectly wrapped
Waiting to be bought

Nor is she a pupil
Apt to be taught
On the functions of beauty
A gilded statue
Painfully over-wrought

Furthermore,
She won’t cater to your vision
Dressing like a senseless whore
With dyed blonde hair and clothes that wear her
Making her a trashy bore

If she is to bare herself she does it to express
To express the divine creature that she is
Who loves that sexy dress
And the way it makes her feel

As for how you draw her
Bitch will tell you that it smells
She’ll burn it up in anger
She sends it straight to hell
She can see the smoke rise
She must be herself
She is the phoenix from the ashes
She will write it well

But in the meantime, as she stumbles down the yellow brick road
Not quite Dorothy, nor green as the jaded……you know
She lives in/as the construct
Made inside and out
Blow-dried
Waxed
Lips ready to pout
She is bitch
Hear her shout

Breakfast

Poached eggs which I broke over my turmeric smothered cauliflower.

I also added two tablespoons of labne (it's a yogurt spread from the Middle East, much like sour cream) for the the pieces of cauliflower that didn't get egg (and some of them that did). It was so delicious, that I licked my plate clean! I love my crazy, albeit solitary, ways! In the future, in mixed company, I will politely use a piece of pita bread to soak up all the extra egg yolk, or better yet, lay all of it down upon the pita, so that the pita catches every little bit of the oh-so-nutritous runny, raw, and organic, egg yolk.

Welcome

Could I be anymore grand? I suppose I could have created my serious, quasi-academic, blog on the first of January, and been truly grandiose, but I was busy ;). Anyways, here I am, fresh in 2013, and missing you dear reader. The Elegant Word was a great blog, and in its demise I find myself lacking its spacious expanse for the words and thoughts my mind wishes to release and create. So I am back, with verve, and Lady's Love Letters has been born. They are various as I am, an infinitude of springs my heart summons my brain to create to complete the wishes of my soul in these oh-so-important moments of my life I chose to share with you. A mouthful, I know but so is any kind of real love. Real love is fleshy and luscious, grand and conspicuous, wanting to be shared and made manifest, justified, edified, deified even. So I share with you, dear reader, and hope that I tickle your brain, touch your heart, and move your soul a little. Or, on an average day, just give you something interesting to read or look at, that, I promise, always comes from love :)