Pho by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

How happy to be with a soup belly,
make careful sloshing steps.

To eat all the noodles with chopsticks,
eat beansprouts, flank. Which is delightful,

to eat soup without a spoon, tilting the bowl
up like an offering to the end of manners,

a bipod of your elbows on the table sliding
subtly, little circles, the gift of soup, that

and the need for a new shirt, napkins
to scrub my beard, the steam on my glasses

putting the world away, as if there is
no world I need besides what I’m holding,

and maybe what I’m now carrying inside me
is a big soup baby, oh Mary don’t be jealous,

you know how I feel.


Hugh Behm-Steinberg, CA, USA

Our New Washing Machine by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Exulting in our new washing machine,
which like poetry is ambiguous about
how much you can finally shove in.

Even earlier, eating preserved lemon slices,
read in bed and slope in my shirt,
under exquisitely clean sheets.

Mary says that is the fondest landscape
when you’re there in bed with me and
I say oh yeah well here’s a little earthquake,
here’s a little mess.

And there’s too many socks
they spill on the floor and they all make
mystical assertions you’d think they’d float
by themselves but all they evidence

is our short attention spans
and the amount of clothes to fold
while the washing machine
whirs and chirps like the dialtones
murmuring out of European telephones.




Hugh Behm-Steinberg