Recipe

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.