Poetry Served Hot

Dani ROSE Fitch

Words are savory

like a good beef stew.

Slow-cooked sentences,

tender and nourishing

meat, the meaning

with hearty nutritional value.

The structure, a pot, 

to fill with ingredients.

A perfect balance built from

carroty adverbs,

sweet and lively;

adjectival onions peeling

providing effective portions of piquancy.

Celery-like pronouns and

parsley articles create bland spaces 

for the meat to pull through, texture, context.

And the broth,

warm and steamy 

connotation-filled liquid

swirling with meaning,

meaty tones dripping into the melting pot

filling bready punctuation,

season as desired.

Pour the syllabic suspension in

to the bowl of your soul.

Let it satiate your hunger for substance,

nourish your values.

Let them, the letters, each vitamin, 

become a part of who you are:

flavorful fats, energizing proteins, 

a starchy, potato-y conglomeration of completion;

until they are used to inspire thought and action.

Blend your own flavor.

Cook your confessions in consciousness

over the flames of public discourse

and let your voice feed reality.

Dani Rose Fitch, originally from Peoria, Illinois, is a writer, student, and newly established writing instructor whose work dwells in the brambles between critical theory, composition pedagogies, poetry, and speculative fiction. Their current academic research explores teaching the art of voice in an age of large language models. She will be receiving her MA from EIU in May 2026 and teaching composition while pursuing a PhD in English at Northern Illinois University beginning the following fall. Dani’s creative practice is deeply rooted in the science of the natural world, technology, ethics, and the magic of posthumanism.