Bread, by Laurie Kuntz
How many grandmothers in the regions of memory baked bread,
their hands wrinkled white, made soft by the fine sift of flour,
their aprons smelling of leavened dough and their bosoms warm
with the rise of all that keeps a family from hunger.
And now, it is bread we resist, an empty starch,
we don’t want to look like our grandmothers,
big breasted, waist-less women with laughs as round
and uneven as loaves coming from wood burning stoves.
What we substitute for a diet of bread,
leaves us thin and hungry for those broad hands
that pummeled grains into shapes kneaded to memory.
If there were no more bread to be made,
what would grandmothers do with their idle hands
and all the fruit that needs to be boiled into jelly?
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Laurie Kuntz has published: That Infinite Roar, Gyroscope Press, Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay, The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line, Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press, and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 