Category: Flavor Town USA

Calling all gluttons, picky eaters, fry cooks, servers: get on the grill with the burnt edges for HFR. Welcome to “Flavor Town USA,” where food writing takes on a whole new spin.

Avery Gregurich: Two Poems for Flavor Town USA

The Recipe Said When Picking Rhubarb, Red or Green Would Doafter Ted Kooser head to walt’s house north of the casino, checking your rearviewoften for any hangerson eager for the whereabouts of the last goodrhubarb of the season. greet walt with bottom shelf rum in exchange for the rhubarb. accept when he pours some in…
Three Collaborative Poems by Lauren Hilger & Dionissios Kollias for Flavor Town USA

Party Favors I pretend it’s the fast and vicious future with a slow sax and 1991 looming overblack sheer tights, friendly kisses on both cheeks. I close my eyes to their emeralds and rubies and panic, capture and share,hand it over to others. I give it away too soon,before it becomes me. Part of my…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Beer Can Chicken Primer: Revised” by Avery Gregurich

never ask the scout leader about the troop’s beer can chicken recipe because you are not and were never a scout of any kind. he makes it better off duty anyway, down the hill in his driveway where the divorce camper is parked. all recipe-makers now implore you to get that charcoal hot, crucify that…
Flavor Town USA: Excerpts from ROSE MASK, service conversations by Jared Joseph

Rose Mask is a series of transcriptions of conversations between myself and the customers I served at a cocktail lounge and restaurant in Santa Cruz, CA, during 3 months of masked service due to the pandemic. The work is further framed as an impossible-to-stage work of theater, one that unfortunately plays itself out constantly in…
Two Poems for Flavor Town USA by Avery Gregurich

I Keep Guzzling Bug Juice, Thirsty As I Am I can never leave the Casey’s convenience store without myBug Juice. I just gotta have that sport cap thrill. It’s always gotthe Vitamin C I’ll need, and less sugar than apple juice. There’seven a Straw’ Nana flavor to boot! Some like it hot. Others drinkonly Whistl’…
Poem for Flavor Town USA: “Testimony (Toward JELL-O® Cake)” by Avery Gregurich

I am reminded of birth by JELL-O®. My mom kept the couponed color, no matter near or far, each cake a sponge cherry-red with memory—the question persisting: should I be outside? How I have lived! Have lived amongst the stars at the drive-in movie, and here as well. I honest to God thought that Springsteen…
“Driving Through Geneva” a poem for Flavor Town USA by Avery Gregurich

for Wallace Ferguson Driving through Geneva is not a peaceful practice, holds nopractical mayhem beyond a Cracker Barrel, all lit up in rockingchair relief. When I finally got to Spoon River, it was all out of itsbanks, wandering unforgiven inside of Illinois, and when I got tothe cemetery, the caretaker was smoking, small, and petting…
“Two Little Stories about Black Beans”: A Flavor Town USA Fiction by Eli S. Evans

1. I was in my twenties and living in the sort of apartment one lives in in one’s twenties, ramshackle and tumbledown on the wrong side of town. But it was very spacious, and I subsidized my income, which was both part-time and meager, by subleasing out various of the rooms I didn’t use as…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “The Sugar Eaters” from THE DUST THAT SINGS by Alex Gregor

they was sittin round the fireplace sippin tea & eatin fruitcake on crushed velvet divans with bronze claw feet on oriental rugs, when the maid walked in with a silver tray weighed down with a heaping mound of sugar cubes. the headmaster of the school, seated between the principals, waved her hand in the maid’s…