Antonia Clark  ~  poems, short-shorts, and readings

 

Tassajara

Young, wholesome as coarse grain,
we opened ourselves, kneaded
to the beat in our bellies, breathed
the music into the dough, air into the loaf,
let the yeast do its good work.

It was heavy bread, to tear and chew,
spread thick with honey, bread to soothe
a child, fill the mouth of a lover. Bread
with a past, bread with a future, bread
you could believe in, bread without end.

And afterward, hot tea, a distant tinkling
of bells, whispered prayers, the world
opening to nourish us with its great heart,
its small voice: Take and eat.

Published in Shakespeare's Monkey Revue, 2(2), 2009 

Big Baby: A Girl's Life

They called her a big baby, crybaby, bawlbaby, because she cried over every little thing. Not the gunned down gangsters on TV, but the thread of pale blood trickling from her own skinned knees; not the dead deer splayed across the hood of her father's Chevy, but squashed ants, spiders flushed down the toilet; not the smashed windows of the factory, but eggshells, broken dolls, missing puzzle pieces. She was a sniffer, a snuffler, a sniveler, a ninny, a namby-pamby. She was set to blubbering by noises in the night, lobsters boiling in a pot, the cut and bleeding vegetables, thrown snowballs, spitballs, stones, the shifty eyes of construction workers on the corner, wolves who howled on the ridge, wolves who ate children, orphans, lost kittens, Mrs. Vincent with holes in her clothes, the priest who passed a basket because he was so poor. Not by the way her father smacked the table with his hand, but the way her mother flinched and lowered her eyes.

Published in Six Little Things, Issue 13, 2008.