Two Poems
Mandy Michno
[Total Pages: 3]
Michno Page 1

Bread

Bakery mornings, a thin apron,
checkered red-and-white. Brisk sash
offers a waist, the shutters pushed wide:
someone else's hours, simple as cinnamon.

It's as if you were born old, prepared for
    pigeons
and staunch tweed, thistle-pulling and
the hard cast of an iron. Buttonhooks
spoke forgotten occupations --
fletcher, cooper, farrier -- the yearning
to make a trade. My datebook for your horses.
For your woodbins, your carvings,
your habits and devotions.

***

In a way, work was the stone
pitched from a riverbank, value uncertain.

Beating the dough with fists, there was nothing
you could say was wrong.
You shower daily. No desire for plagues,
infections, the dangers of pre-antibiotic society;
you are neither Gothic nor consumptive.

Unbidden, a knife entered the thought of your
    mouth,
sharping down the center of your tongue.
Your eyes tighten, but it kept on:
a divided tongue, anonymous but
rooted in the mouth's wet ground,
streaming new metallic blood.

***