Annie Cody Holdren

A Shared Meal

Mid-January in Santa Cruz, my husband and I sit at a long table with five friends and a dozen others we don’t yet know but will, including a young Russian couple who have moved to California and want to learn something about our local edible mushrooms.

sipping
cream of chanterelle soup
from a shot glass
there are so many ways
to alter one’s perspective

The menu focuses on wild-foraged fungi. After soup we’re served a salad of chervil and watercress topped with hedgehogs and maitake. Next comes the fish course—candy cap-glazed black cod with porcinis, accompanied by a puree of black trumpets—and then the main meat, curried goat with saffron milk caps. Dessert is a blue-gray ice cream made with huitlacoche, a fungal delicacy in Mexican cuisine—also known as corn smut.

the common nouns
of mushrooms trumpet
their abundance
while mycelium extends
unnoticed as linking verbs

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About the Author

Annie Cody Holdren’s professional career has centered on interpreting and writing about archaeology and natural history.  Her poems have been published in Catamaran, Nostos, Frogpond, Canary, Kerning, and other literary magazines and poetry anthologies. 

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