The new issue of Measure

magazine features an essay by Seamus Heaney on Dylan Thomas’s legacy, interview with MacArthur Genius Grant recipient A.E. Stallings, and poems by Thomas Lynch, Lucinda Roy, Ernest Hilbert, Rachel Hadas, Richard Wakefield, Wilmer Mills, Bruce Bond, Tony Barnstone, and Andrew Hudgins. Here is my poem “’Good Taste is the Excuse I’ve Always Given’” from the issue. Click here to subscribe.

Organ meat is sort of like organ music. Great at first, but too much
of it will probably kill you. – Dan Okrent

After an hour’s shower he feels flensed,
Gorgonized by Glen Mhor, revived by coffee,
Auburned with cream. You will find no imposture
In this abode. It’s all authentic, though rinsed
And husked, dried and cleaned. He will agree
That a brand serves as a cynosure,
A guide to what fare is finest, discreet
And above the hoi polloi’s poor choices.
Is he a thing to envy or resent?
Are the subtle and refined for the effete?
Can too much excellence, too, be a vice?
Taste makes his caste; nurture, his accent.
Slicings and drainings make him a connoisseur,
Suds of blood and drool, his abattoir.