[Poetry] Breadmaking and the Sea by Jackie McClure

It gets away from you if

you don't attend to it right away,

takes over.

Punched, it merely springs back,

somehow even bigger than before.

Rolled, it becomes obstinate,

wooden almost,

like a tongue, fleshy and soft, yet,

inconvertible.

Left too long it will end up tough,

overwhelmed by its own expansion,

spreading when it's finally captured

and formed, it turns in retaliation like

Medusa's stone-loaved faces.

Fingers full of aspirational

alchemy, we're again

aiming for some small

control over forces

outside of ourselves:

The gravity of yeast,

the salty foam of the ocean's shore,

the squeak of a door hinge,

light in the night,

where the tree branch falls,

that it falls at all,

the path of a river brimming,

the sifting of the earth's skin,

swelling, contracting, stretching to

take in more, all, eventually

settling again with a sigh.

If I could dream of breadmaking and the sea, I would add the salt,

I would knead it with my heels, barefooted, adding the water to the dry,

sprinkle, knead, sprinkle, knead, again, again, forever, pushing, kneading, sprinkling,

pushing back.

Jackie McClure would almost rather always be swimming but when rooted on land she writes poetry and fiction striving to contextualize the commonplace. Her poetry has recently appeared in Humana Obscura, Penumbra, Wild Roof Journal, Hellbender, and The Bluebird Word. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems inspired by plants. She lives in the Cascadia bioregion near the Salish Sea in the northwest corner of Washington State.