Café Rotavirus - a barf poem by John Estes
There’s an upside to getting written up in Slate magazine, as barfblog.com did last week, and it’s that a new audience can be reached.
Like the barf poetry crowd.
John Estes, who teaches at the University of Missouri, wrote me this morning to say he discovered barfblog.com through the Slate article, and that,
“Since you have no barf poetry (it's a niche genre) I wanted to offer my poem, 'Cafe Rotavirus.'"
So here it is (and that's John's son, Jonah, with their dog, Sophie, right)..
Cafe Rotavirus
Last time we all
ate here, a Sunday, after
the baby played with
—chewed on—
their toys: six
days and nights
of puke and diarrhea.
This stuff kills
starving kids in Africa,
underdeveloped as
electrolyte industries
are there.
But I cannot stop
returning and returning.
What pathogenesis
makes me weak
for, so consoled by,
this biscuits and gravy—
though I cannot
stop imagining
trillions of rotifer-driven
microbes racing
around this apparent
locus amoenus
like, but not like,
animated soap
bubbles scrubbing up
bathtub scum?
To believe in history,
now that fixed
stars are not so fixed,
might be to believe
each instant struggles—
fatally, hopefully—
to loose itself from
some unoriginate whole.
But, and this makes
instinctual sense
so long as instinct is
nothing but undigested
experience, it may also,
or maybe instead,
be the collective orgy
clearing its gorge,
suffusing each instant
with the particles
of every other
but in tastier order,
because nothing is real
until it means
and nothing means
until it returns,
returns like a dog returns,
as it will with verve,
to a baby’s vomit.
John Estes teaches at the University of Missouri and lives in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared (or will) in West Branch, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Tin House, and other places. He is author of Kingdom Come (C&R Press, forthcoming) and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve (Poetry Society of America, 2009) which won a National Chapbook Fellowship. See his website for more poems and prose.
From France to Kansas City: foodborne illness in schools
Several headmasters from the Haute-Garonne and Tarn primary schools in France simultaneously informed the health authorities of the occurrence of digestive disorders of low severity among students.
A retrospective cohort study, conducted through self-administered questionnaires among approximately 3,000 students and teachers who had participated in two meals in 36 schools concerned, was initiated to confirm the existence of a foodborne outbreak and its origin. …
This large-scale foodborne outbreak illustrates the main factors that encourage the occurrence of foodborne outbreaks (multiple malfunctions in the preparation of meals), and stresses the importance of associating the epidemiological, veterinary and microbiological investigations in the early management of the alert, as well as the first management measures (eviction of sick personal) to avoid major consequences in collective catering.
Meanwhile in Missouri, two Lee's Summit kindergarten students have been hospitalized with salmonella.
The kids, a boy and a girl, have been enrolled in Richardson Kids Country during the school year. The Health Department has not determined if their illness is related to the school.
Raccoon: the other dark meat
When I was 17-years-old, my friend Dave and I hitchhiked to Grand Bend, Ontario, on Lake Huron, to go camping for a few days.
A camping neighbor went into town and bought us four cases of beer – for a fee. We asked for Pleasure Packs – Molson Canadian and Export – and he came back with something else. It contained a beer called 50. Horrible, horrible beer.
But we drank it.
I won’t go into all the sordid details – girlfriends visiting and not being happy, sleeping with the American girls, the dead raccoon – but we got kicked out of the park and then rechecked in under another name.
Did I mention the dead raccoon?
We didn’t eat it.
But I didn’t know about Missouri back then.
The Kansas City Star reported this morning,
He rolls into the parking lot of Leon's Thriftway in an old, maroon Impala with a trunk full of frozen meat. Raccoon — the other dark meat.
In five minutes, Montrose, Mo., trapper Larry Brownsberger is sold out in the lot at 39th Street and Kensington Avenue. Word has gotten around about how clean his frozen raccoon carcasses are. How nicely they’re tucked up in their brown butcher paper. How they almost look like a trussed turkey … or something.
Seriously, Dave and I drove a 1972 Impala to Grand Bend.
Raccoons go for $3 to $7 — each, not per pound — and will feed about five adults. Four, if they’re really hungry.
Those who dine on raccoon meat sound the same refrain: It's good eatin'. …
The meat isn’t USDA-inspected, and few state regulations apply, same as with deer and other game. No laws prevent trappers from selling raccoon carcasses.
Raw milk sickens infant; lawsuit filed
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As a father with four daughters and a fifth on the way, I relate to the let’s not make kids sick aspect of raw milk.Proponents of raw milk say that is just so much statistical shit, and that hardly anyone gets sick from raw milk.
Except it is entirely preventable, and well-meaning people get sucked in by nutritional gobbledygook.
Like Angela Pedersen, who says her almost one-year-old Larry contracted E. coli O157:H7 from raw milk she bought at the Herb Depot and Organic Market in Monett, Miss.
"It was a living hell. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. I don't know how many days I would look at my son and I didn't know if he was going to take another breath.”
The family's now suing that business. Pedersen says back in April she went to the store to buy almond milk. She says she was then told about the benefits of raw milk.
"We were approached and told that the goat's milk would be a better alternative. It's healthier than breast milk and it would be wonderful for him. We agreed to try it," says Pedersen.
