John Poch
Flours
Between geometry and death, she is baking again.
Sisters of the poor, what more can we do but breathe,
what door can we build for her courtyard?
To love our country, to bless heaven,
let us build her an outdoor oven.
The sky waits like a seed and sees
what will befall us all must rise.
We hope she has a crush on us.
When she reaches up and chooses one flour
over another, loving mothers sigh. The flours
can’t imagine what wheat they were
or bread they may become. The hours
blink less while she works. They love a little oil.
Who but she shakes sugar . . .
and erases her labor of white with a labor in white?
I wish her the best rest sifted in a cool room:
old tiles, old faucets, old clean crystals on a lamp,
and the air full of new smoke from a chimney the size
of her ring finger, an incense of walnut ink and snowmelt.
She can conceive of that cloud shaped
like an apple pie rising, slowly rising
its burnished crust into the blue vault of hunger.
John Poch’s most recent book, Fix Quiet, won the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His work has appeared recently in Yale Review, The Common, Image, Four Way Review, and other journals.