Yes, I got up at 4 a.m. today to drive to a grocery store to pick up two dozen paczkis. Custard, lemon, blueberry, cherry, apple, and raspberry. I tend to stay away from prune. (For those of my disciples who don't know what paczkis are, I pity you. The best way I can describe them--they are doughnuts on steroids. One final culinary extravagance before the fish of Lent.)
This evening, I'm going to one of my daughter's last band concerts of her high school career. Then, I'm going to come home and eat another paczki. Maybe apple.
Tomorrow, no meat. Fasting between meals. Sacrifice.
Saint Marty prefers doughnuts to ashes.
Bigfoot and Bird
Celebrate Mardi Gras
by: Martin Achatz
Bigfoot has had a thing for jazz
ever since he heard Charlie Parker
in the cedar swamp, horn
stuttering in moss and marsh
like a timber wolf with hiccups,
a moose and rhino in rut, clouds
of hungry flies on a July beach.
He followed that sound, found
Bird sitting on a stump,
fingers moving so fast and hard
on that gold stick that Bigfoot
thought he was killing it
for dinner, wringing every
last drop of life out of its ribs,
making it scream so beautifully
that constellations stopped dead
in their tracks to listen.
Bird nodded
at him, kept playing and playing,
up through laced branches,
down into mud and root,
crying, howling, bansheeing
until that whole wild joint was jumpin’.
Then Bird paused, looked at him,
said, “You’re one big bastard,”
stood up, started blowing again,
marching, swinging his sax,
and Bigfoot followed, clapping,
stomping, waving his arms, not
caring who saw his missing link
ass parading all the way down
to Bourbon Street, snatching beads
out of the air like Jesus collecting
souls on Judgement Day.
