By: Rob Chirico

My books on magic? The Waite, the Yeats, the Blavatsky?
All gone.
After all, what is magic
but the art of making things disappear.
My feat was not art of artifice,
it was truth.
And, truth be told,
needing the money,
I sold them.
Forty years of collecting.
Poof! As it were.
Upon saying one last farewell
(while stroking them, or just dusting them)
I noted that there was a wormhole through the gilt edge of my Crowley.
Where did the worm go after its heady meal?
Did it discover what it was looking for?
Or did it uncover something—
something it had never dreamt of?
Indeed, do worms dream?
Probably not when they are eating through Timesbestsellers.
But what about Borges, Gogol, and Poe?
Does it slink away content
or mad?

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Rob Chirico worked on his Ph.D in Art History at NYU. He is a freelance writer and artist living Greenfield, Massachusetts. His nostalgic cookbook/memoir—“Not My Mother’s Kitchen: Rediscovering Italian-American Cooking Through Stories and Recipes” (Imagine, September 2016)—is a blend of humor and tasty recipes for Italian-American food. His irreverent, but highly entertaining “Damn! A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America” was published in paperback by Pitchstone Press in 2014, but it is available as an eBook as well. His book “Field Guide to Cocktails (Quirk/Random House, 2005) has sold nearly 30,000 copies. His “Onward Kitchen Soldiers” (April 2014/eBook with Untreed Reads) is a witty look at what goes on in the world of cookbooks, food media and public relations. He also won the $10,000 grand prize in the 1991 Sutter Home Build-A-Better-Burger cooking contest. He has contributed to the culinary publication Gastronomica, and he has also written the text for the books “Martini Madness” and “Up in Smoke,” along with the novels “Art in the Blood” and “Vermeer Tango,.”