Her hands sink into the dough,
the secret ingredient. Pushing and pulling
and shaping. Already the loaf takes form,
just softer.
Her name means “desired one” but her name
doesn’t matter. Most labels don’t matter (names
included), it’s what a person does that matters, and
it’s our actions we should wear around
our necks instead of our names if we really
want to be proud of something.
She slaps the dough and it slaps back,
her hands red, punishing.
What matters is flour. Sliced ham, rusty faucets.
Stained glass and Sunday church and
sunlight that drips like honey.
Hymns, petunia fertilizer, bread.
Soapy bath water and babies and God.
She was beautiful when she was young
but she isn’t beautiful now. But that
doesn’t matter. Not really.
Lanky boys who try to kiss
beautiful girls will grow
into lanky men who forget their names.
A brief silence. She winces and rubs flour
into her hair. She is bigger, now,
wiser and ten years older.
There was one lanky boy, however,
who didn’t grow into a lanky
man. Instead, his bones supplied the
soil with three flowers, and his memory
slipped like a shadow into the ages.
Mama was sixteen when she first kissed him,
says that his tongue tasted like
honey and had the thickness of it, too.
He was a friend of a friend’s, had just
moved from northern Alabama,
eyes like the mouth of a wild river rush.
He had the texture of pepper, all spice and
sting and hot breath on slick teeth.
Mama says he made her think of quicksand, hellfire,
the empty spaces that lie between grace and church.
Three days later he proposed, bare-backed and bare-footed
in her grandmother’s garden. The ring was plastic and the
jewel had fell off when his brother stepped on it,
but things like that didn’t matter.
He had already drunk the earth dry,
she was the most glorious thing he had seen in his life,
he was seventeen, a man, and it was time to settle down.
But Mama didn’t like the word “seen.” It
was too opaque, had the consistency of water,
reminded her of the blood grazing the
inside of her skin. She looked up and a bird flew
overhead, made her think of falling feathers
and falling grace.
A knob turns and the oven heats like an awaiting
damnation. Steam and whispers and angel wings
cutting through the glass door.
Three days later, two fishermen found that boy
at the lip of the Mississippi. His arms were splayed,
eyes pebble-white. Mama says he lay on the beach with his
palms cupped, as if already holding the water of God.
She was invited to the funeral, but declined.
Went, instead, to college. Learned to measure
heartbeats and headaches,
liters of blood, the substance of life.
Six years later, she fell in love. Married my father.
Thought about the boy just enough to remember his taste
but not his name.
There is milk in her voice.
White and slippery, it slithers down her throat
and she grows taller, stronger.
My father’s palms are warm and soft, brown and
shaped like a baker’s loaf. According to mama, he tastes
like bread, all flour and sugar dancing on her tongue.
My brother and I, the products of too much love, were
always taught that we lived on the cusp of something beautiful.
The dough slips into the oven like an animal
going into hiding.
This is my mother.
Long and brown like a strip of
Mexican desert, coarse like the tail
of an unbroken horse, unforgiving like
the straight-back arrow of a southern sun.
Clouds nest between her shoulder blades;
she is skin-tight and hair-loose,
breasts like shy waves coaxed from the ocean floor.
My father tells her she is beautiful.
I tell her she is nature’s diamond.
She laughs whenever we say this.
She checks the oven. Hair hangs before her face and
I think of curtains going down, windows being closed,
doors being shut.
But what I do not tell her is that I, too, believe
that actions matter. That sometimes,
half-asleep, I can taste blood on the edges of my teeth,
or, screaming from nightmares, sugar
under my tongue. That sometimes I think the
dead boy’s residue is creeping in my veins.
That I don’t know if these things matter, and
I don’t know if she does, either.
The bread is done.
Heavy and thick and white, its steam rises and
coats the air. Mama offers me the first piece
(our family never waits for things to cool).
I take a bite and my mouth burns like hellfire.
“Delicious,” I tell her, because even though
my tongue is sandpaper, it is undoubtedly so.
Five minutes later, we converge at the sink.
Soap and water and silver pans,
elbows become blurs as we scrub down our efforts.
Mama smiles sweetly because we are bonding.
I listen to her chatter but cannot grasp the substance
(perhaps I am lucky and it won’t matter). Instead,
as my mind wanders, I cannot help wondering,
as the water runs across her hands and onto mine,
if this soap is strong enough to wash our sins away.
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