01 dec 2004
Cutting Bread and Under a Plastic Tarp
by Kathryn
Kysar
Cutting Bread
Making sandwiches
in the late night house,
she cuts heavy crusted bread with a long
serrated knife.
Crumbs of grain gather on the coarse
wood board
as her blade saws through the tender
middle.
She
layers sticky white cheese, slippery
sliced meat,
then spreads tangy, seed-speckled mustard
on one,
mayonnaise and butter for another.
Darkness
breathes in the summer windows.
A BBC voice tells of atrocities in Iraq,
heads cut from bodies, held high for
the camera,
ski-masked villains clutching them
by the hair.
Though she cannot see the knife,
she imagines it--bloodied and curved,
cutting through gristle, tendon, and
vertebrae,
blood pumping after the body was severed,
the
bit of flesh hanging off the end.
Above her, her children and husband
sleep, windows open
to the rhythmic sounds of cars passing,
echoes
of train wheels on trestles, cicadas
in tall grass.
The earth breathes.
The bread breathes too.
She slides sandwiches in plastic
bags,
presses zippers, sealing them in.
She lines the lunchs on the cold
metal shelf.
The door clicks shut,
and the light goes off.
She turns off the radio and stands
in the starlight,
lays the knife on the counter
by the sink
and walks the stairs to join
the sleeping.
Under a Plastic Tarp
In the first days
of the war,
she comes to me, her face
on the front page of my newspaper.
She is caring for her husband,
her sick six month old baby,
living on a rocky ledge under a sheet
of plastic
outside of Baghdad. She has a dented
pot,
a blue plastic bucket with dirty water,
city clothes and not enough blankets,
her breast milk getting thin as
she waits for the bombs to come and go,
white rock dust smeared on the staring
blank face of her older, wide-eyed child.
I sip my coffee. All over the world,
women
are turning on burners or blowing on
a few dried twigs,
flames for food, warmth, and sustenance,
not shock and awe. We linked by fire
and water,
pots of steaming grain and warm toasted
bread,
the hungry eyes and mouths of waiting
children.
My
daughter plunks down her crust
and joyously announces "I'm done,
I'm full!"
She carries her plastic bunny plate to
the sink,
then returns to the basement to play camping
with her brother, cooking soup on a pretend
fire,
sleeping on a pile of couch pillows and
hairy dog blankets.
Pretending the world is safe, I close the
paper
and rinse white china in a stream of clear
clean liquid,
trail slow circles with the soapy sponge,
haunted
by the woman under a plastic tarp.
Kathryn
Kysar’s book Dark
Lake was published by Loonfeather Press
in 2002. Her poems have been featured on
Garrison
Keillor’s
A Writer’s Almanac
and have appeared in Pinyon, Painted
Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, Communitas,
Dust
and Fire, The Midland Review, The Talking
Stick, and The Minnesota Poetry Calendar.
A finalist for the SASE/Jerome Fellowship
in 2001 and 2002 and a winner of the Lake
Superior Writer’s Contest and the
SASE Poetry Contest in 2002, Kysar was
the first
writer-in-residence at Banfill-Locke Center
for the Arts in Fridley. Her website can
be found at http://www.kysar.com. |
