Tuesday poem #73 : Arielle Greenberg : Pastoral: Baking

You take all the goodliness:

            the flour from the flowering stalk

            the cocoa from the small dark bean

            the eggs from the laying hens

            the sugar cracked from the hard cane

            the salt and its licking

Put them in my bowl

and muddle

Afterward, I am shining with plant life

skin scratched to newness

flush with animal protein

in my throat

and hair

and os

and cheek

and cervix

and eyes

I am tilled and plowed and heated through

and I come out delicious

Three hours later, you muddle again, harder

That’s one of the things I like so much about you

Arielle Greenberg is co-author of Home/Birth: A Poemic; author of My Kafka Century and Given; and co-editor of three anthologies, including Gurlesque. She lives in Maine and teaches out of her home, in the Maine community, and in the Oregon State University-Cascades low residency MFA, and writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan