Japanese-style Pub by Takuma Kimura

as shiny as if freshly laid
You are a melancholy fruit.
Solanum Melongena.
Every animal is sad
after eggplant.
Erica Jong, The Eggplant Epithalamion


It is a sort of dream, which coincides
With the pacific relaxations called
Preferred Reality. Men who forget
Lovingly chopped-up cloves of ail, who scorn
The job of slicing two good peppers thinly,
Then two large onions and six aubergines -
Those long, impassioned and imperial purples -
Which, with six courgettes, you sift with salt
Douglas Dunn, Ratatouille


Eggplant, the bruise-fruit, heals
in a darkroom as photographs
of contusions develop.

Gathered in a farmer's truck,
eggplants appear ready to travel
into outer space, there to visit
purple planets in our galaxy.

The mayor has disappeared.
He was last seen getting into
a taxicab near the produce-market.
He was accompanied by an eggplant,
which he carried in a burgundy valise.

Shiny, soft, and smooth,
eggplants suggest patent-leather
shoes worn by a species whose feet
differ from ours in certain respects.

Although I dislike eating
its slippery flesh, I pay
aubergine certain respects.

There is eggplant. There
it is - a pliable stone
sitting in purple patience
waiting for us to go away.
Hans Ostrom, Aubergine


Back at Nijo, his Murasaki, now on the eve of womanhood, was very
pretty indeed. So red could after all be a pleasing color, he thought. She
was delightful, at artless play in a soft cloak of white lined with red.
Because of her grandmother's conservative preferences, her teeth had not
yet been blackened or her eyebrows plucked.
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji


no money
no things
no teeth
just me
Santoka Taneda