Frank Graziano | The Sun Magazine

Frank Graziano

Frank Graziano lives in Iowa City, where he’s the editor of the Grilled Flowers Press. “Iowa has its share of beauty,” he writes, “if one can keep a distance from the politics, etc. that tend to blur it over. Here, it seems, poetry is the stem, and politics the rose. Urgg.”

— From December 1978
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Pity: A Lesson In Self-Discovery

I have read that within the veneer of each heart a limp fist of pity is hanging. That is, in all the sadness and confusion of its tangle of veins the heart is the package in which pity is stored, the container in which it is marketed. One might say: I’d like two loaves of bread, a half-pound of bologna, a pint of macaroni salad, and a heart and a half of pity, please.

December 1978
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Mushrooms: A Lesson In Self-Discovery

Take the Campeche line out of Mexico or Veracruz (second class accommodations are half the price with little difference in comfort) and disembark with your perspiration at the Palenque station, named after the nearby breath-taking ruins. Here we find a mushroom with particular inner color, filled with the age old insanity of the Mayans, wisdom stored as knowledge in the mushroom’s files, as a tree stores its glucose in fruit.

March 1978
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Wine: A Lesson In Self-Discovery

Now the wine, selection of which is both an art and a science, both of which you may at present ignore, for Cabernet Sauvignon (Red, sturdy, full-bodied! Strong in flavor and bouquet!) most easily mingles with blood. Although quite expensive, B.V. Reserve is the best of this varietal, and is therefore suggested.

January 1978
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Breasts: A Lesson In Self-Discovery

The room temperature should be comfortable but a bit on the cool side to insure the full development of the castle and each of the respective pawns and moats of the areola.

December 1977
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