And then I catch you, baking after midnight again,
mushrooming flour a nuclear cloud in your hair.
Elbow deep, you dive into a chipped bowl
to try on useful hands, fingertips dusted for prints
of mothers all over America making dinner
from the leftovers of their dreams.
There are so many snowmen you haven’t made,
standing on the hillsides of imagined lives women
in floral aprons salt away. This is it, this is the loaf
to save our lives, the one to show me how a wife looks.
Sweat on your lip, the condensation of a smile, you grab,
release, clutch and let go. Tongue in teeth, knead,
need the way you know men dream of working a breast.
I wait to be touched by floury thumbs. And you wait,
for the rise or fall, the moon at the bare window folded in,
again, the crescent of your ring cutting dough to heal like scar.
Angela Readman is a poet and short story writer. Her poetry collection Strip was published by Salt.
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