A Poem

Sometime around February or March of this year I stopped finishing poems, and sometime around May I stopped really trying to write them. 

This was a creative drought. Feeling like I have nothing to say is familiar, but following a fall where I was writing almost daily, I found it frustrating all the same. 

A couple weeks ago a happenstance that has happened many times before happened once again. It was a simple moment that roused me to revisit a poem I had started two years ago, in the fall of 2022. What has resulted is an entirely different poem, but the sentiment stayed the same. 

Probably this is also not its final version, but I shared it was a friend and they offered a valuable (and perhaps unintentional) edit that, in my opinion, improved the poem vastly. So I am putting it here, mostly to allow this iteration of it a place to live all its own, but perhaps also to open it up to opinions. Which- if you have some- I encourage you to share. 

- Cat 

Making

We’re makers. 

Or maybe modest bakers. Dough rises

twice as much as we’re hoping stretches less

than we’d like but our busy bodies are hungry

each Wednesday night. It is important to share 

meals abundantly. It's easier to gift

what you’ve already been given so we

keep our hands in a crescent position. 

First there is a fire 

started early. Then zucchini is cut thinly sweating 

onions sautéed slowly garlic warmly wrapped in foil 

arrives roasted already. Flour-dusted fingers and ash-

kissed knuckles know to keep the paddle dusted 

or face a future fate of dough ember encrusted. 

Lastly there’s us. 

Hose-rinsed hands handling cheese and veggies

easy between sips from a beer can. Lay sauce on too 

liberally and salt after but too vigorously. Get distracted 

by the joint passed pleasantly and forget the flour

before trying to slide the pie off the paddle.

As all mistakes 

we are 

also things made.

Trying to open

dough like a palm.