A Dinner
Come to dinner with masks of reeds
and sit with me like at a table of friends.
There’s smokes allowed, billowing out,
and nervous waiters each with a double life.
Offering my hands, you’ll see they’re full
of mussels, scabbed as the dried up lake shore.
They know nothing of indices,
or the vague and fatal price of sentiments.
David Kholamian is a writer and poet living outside Chicago, IL. A DePaul University alumnus, he has fiction published in Fleas on the Dog, creative nonfiction in Chicago's MAKE Lit magazine, and poetry in Crook and Folly and Milk Journal. He has a novel manuscript currently lurking in parts unknown, waiting to creep into the hands of some unsuspecting agent.
Statement by Featured Artist, Shelley Thomas: Images of dried lake beds, mussels, cupped hands, reeds. I see plumes of cigarette smoke. A set dinner table. Natural world juxtaposed with a civilized meal, yet something primal circles the table, licking its chops. “Fatal price of sentiments" stays with me. I imagine a bed of a million tiny mouths, a clutch of mussels, ready to feed.
Art: “Untitled,” 2020 (Black Sands Beach, California)