Could we Live?
by Kindra McDonald
This spring all the grocery stores have run
out of yeast. We are searching the aisles
for this single-cell organism, begging
our neighbors for flour, trying to track
down sourdough starters. We have all
been baking bread and I break bread
virtually over computer communion
with the stale saltine I found in the cabinet
and dip into some cooking sherry, the sacrilege
of this sacred act.
We have all been baking bread
it changes the smell of worry
in our homes to comfort. The melting
butter is like a pool of sun, filling
our stomachs with something
like love, but mostly when we knead
the dough, warm and living, soft
and pliant, it feels like hugging,
it feels like human touch.
If we could live on bread
alone; we could live on
bread that would somehow
make us whole, together alone.
Image: Stuart Buck is a visual artist and award-winning poet living in North Wales. His art has been featured in several journals, as well as gracing the covers of several books. His third poetry collection, Portrait of a Man on Fire, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in November 2020. He is the art editor for Konstellation Magazine and available for commissions all year round. He can be contacted via Twitter or E-Mail
Kindra McDonald is the author of the books Fossils and In the Meat Years, (both in 2019) and the chapbooks Elements and Briars (2016) and Concealed Weapons, (2015). She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is an Adjunct Professor of Writing and teaches poetry at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Bettering American Poetry. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly.
