Eyewear is very glad to welcome rising literary star Joe Dunthorne (pictured) to these pages, especially as the holiday season approaches, for now is a good time to be festive and celebrate this exciting writer's work.
Dunthorne, who graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia the same year as me, is both a fine prose writer and poet. At UEA he did the Prose strand and was awarded the Curtis Brown prize. In 2005, Dunthorne traveled to Bangladesh with the British Council as part of an exchange project with young Bangladeshi writers.
His poetry has been published in magazines and featured on Channel 4 in the UK. His novel, Submarine, is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton in early 2008.
Eating Out
There are dumpsters simply brimming
with left overs and send backs,
black sacks full of nummy slop:
coconut pannacotta
truffle honey mozzarella
California bouillabaisse
and even if you mush
the food together
I’ll bet it still tastes pretty good
but then, you see,
there are these down-by-luck
table-salt of the earth types:
smelling like asparagus piss,
no money, no grub,
little half-healed cuts on their nose bridges,
and anyhow
you’d think they might be allowed
to lick a strand of marinated pig fat
from the inside of a bin bag
but no, because the nosh,
even when it’s been tossed out,
still represents the chef
– it’s still product –
and they say a restaurant’s reputation
is only equal to its clientele
and, on occasion, these homeless chaps
shout abuse through letter boxes
so the really good restaurants
have a cage,
a big steel cage in the alley out the back,
to protect the scraps
from these poor sods
with their bellies cramping
and their sunburnt eyelids
and so, I mean,
it makes you feel terribly helpless really,
forty slightly overdone scallops
going to rot in a cage, imagine.
There are dumpsters simply brimming
with left overs and send backs,
black sacks full of nummy slop:
coconut pannacotta
truffle honey mozzarella
California bouillabaisse
and even if you mush
the food together
I’ll bet it still tastes pretty good
but then, you see,
there are these down-by-luck
table-salt of the earth types:
smelling like asparagus piss,
no money, no grub,
little half-healed cuts on their nose bridges,
and anyhow
you’d think they might be allowed
to lick a strand of marinated pig fat
from the inside of a bin bag
but no, because the nosh,
even when it’s been tossed out,
still represents the chef
– it’s still product –
and they say a restaurant’s reputation
is only equal to its clientele
and, on occasion, these homeless chaps
shout abuse through letter boxes
so the really good restaurants
have a cage,
a big steel cage in the alley out the back,
to protect the scraps
from these poor sods
with their bellies cramping
and their sunburnt eyelids
and so, I mean,
it makes you feel terribly helpless really,
forty slightly overdone scallops
going to rot in a cage, imagine.
poem by Joe Dunthorne
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