The Dangers of Miso Soup
I don’t trust miso soup, she says, and ominous music begins to play in
the background as she pushes her soup away with long rust-colored
mails, miso soup sloshing innocently in its painted bowl, although,
suspiciously murky, hiding strips of seaweed. Even later, when she
tells me what she meant was I am vegetarian, and sometimes Japa-
nese restaurants stir fish paste into their miso soup, I can’t stop the
movie from playing: courageous heroine leaps from her car–escape
facilitated by her unclasped seatbelt–and then! no time to scream,
miso soup in close pursuit, she runs down the street in stilettos, flowy
sleeves billowing like smoke from a gun, miso soup closing in, white
paddle-spoon clattering.
—
This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!
Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
