Mandy Michno

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.

It was – what – early sunlight sweeping the back
    steps,
light awed as the skin of a tadpole.

Dust floats in it like bits of history
shaken from the skirts of ancient cousins,
relations so distant you aren’t a quarter what they
    were,
one whole thing.

He was Irish, a potato farmer. She was French, one
    of three
daughters. English, a clerk. Scottish, their tartan

black and green. Polish, still drunk. Your people.
The Germans back four hundred years.
See how the name has changed.

No Storm

The sidewalk was glassy,
white waves breaking
in the morning.

She collected fallen oranges
from the curbside,
placed a row behind the tires
so he would not drive away.

There is waiting, and there is
waiting. It’s impossible
to say which one until arriving,
eyelids reluctant as caramel
when pulling into sight.

Last night she felt a border,
a burden, the snap.
A bare waist dangled
from the solemn branch,
arms beckoned. The stars

showing between those fingers
were the first reckless foil:
this morning found her hands like paper
waiting to be scored. Thrushes
shook the eucalyptus leaves
beneath the window, landing –

taking flight again.
The sidewalk waved its horizontal lines
until she didn’t care she’d fallen;
a loose dog trotted by
to nose aside an orange.

The brightest crest
stayed planted by the bench,
watching the absence of a later on.

____

Mandy Michno was formerly poetry editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review, and has also published poetry in Clackamas Literary Review.