Daniel Beilinson, "Khimki Forest," 2011
We’d starve if we couldn’t stomach the bitterness. Even after a soak, that cold stream hadn’t washed out enough from acorn and oak to unbind the tongue, but we must eat. (Our hard-times bread not much more than a mush, but oh how we lapped up its flint edge.) Flux may kill us? Then we’ll take our water pink with wine. (The recipe calls for more than Kore’s six seeds to ferment a blood red prairie Lethe. Husks added for a tannic brace, a taste of exile.) We’d die if we fed ourselves with all we thought we knew, who we thought we were, those sweet easy times before— and we’ll die if we ever, finally, forget them.
