Pies&Poems

pizza rats deserve the world nyc has the best pizza in the world and if you say otherwise i’ll fight you in the sewer with two rats tied around my hands and two pigeons lifting me up by the shoulders. one time my formerly brooklynite father directed me to luigi’s pizza. the sourdough crust made me want to transform into a hawk so i could steal slices from dive-bombed customers. 2bros cradled me through broke and drunken nights. artichoke basille replaced my heart. lombardi ’s could stuff me into a brick oven and i ’ d happily lick its insides.   my hometown is beautiful and impossible and we have the best pizza in the world. i went to maryland one time and had pizza in dessert pie crust. that pizza made me want to transform into a hawk so i could snatch it from customers’ hands and then fly back to nyc to get them some real pizza.   but lately i’ve been thinking about how nyc is just one cell in the animal of earth. i’m an anxiety dream turned flesh, built for ch...

Fraction Pie   I hated math, didn’t mind fractions, loved pizza, so naturally, when Mrs. T slapped those magnetized slices of pizza to the whiteboard and called them fractions, I lost it. The slices were two-dimensional, but I fantasized in 3D: thin crust that wasn’t  too  thin, orange-red sauce that was neither too sweet nor too tart, just the right amount of bubbly, browned mozzarella to cover all that tomatoey goodness. Math fell before lunch, a simultaneous delight and torture. On the board, Mrs. T mixed and matched the pepperoni slices with the plain, something I’d never dared to do in real life. I was a strictly plain girl, no pepperoni. 2 slices of plain side by side and 2 slices of pepperoni side by side represented ½ plain, ½ pepperoni. 3 plain, a magnificent cheesy trio, and only 1 pepperoni represented ¾ plain, ¼ pepperoni. Now fast forward to the lunch line, my Styrofoam tray held expectantly in hand. Plain or pepperoni?  the lunch lady asked with a force...