Pancakes

Ingredients: 1 cup of flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 egg
buttermilk
vegetable oil or bacon fat (not a heart healthy option but more authentic)

Put skillet on burner, heat on medium or just over medium.

Sift flour into bowl with baking soda, add salt, combine dry ingredients. Pour buttermilk over ingredients (just some. No exact amount) and let sit for a couple minutes. Do not stir.

Use a pastry brush to apply vegetable oil to skillet. If using bacon grease, cook pancakes after cooking bacon. Drain some of the excess fat into a container and add to pan as needed.

Add egg to mixture, stir with whisk (bubbles important). Add buttermilk until consistency is about like cake batter. Do not over stir.

Pour small amount of batter on skillet and flip when popping the bubbles in batter leaves an indent.

Serve warm. I like homemade jam but my daughter insists upon maple syrup.

what doesn’t kill you…

For once I’m not threatening you with desire. It’s something more sacred than that, but also the need to ease my legs out of trousers and walk across the deep, cold desert on my own.

But it is also revenge. Anger like a hard kernel in the fist of my heart. You’ve sculpted my eyes into new shapes, and they are thinner and less forgiving for you.

The words pour out careless, and everything I used to love gets trapped in a vase, gets shipped to the four corners, gets kicked repeatedly until the energy burns out.

But not the ice.

Maybe I’ll forgive me now. Other people’s tolls: Things they took away, loom so big in the sky, but there’s something left behind. Something harder, smaller.

The arc of the pubic bone,

the screech of rest

the air of festivity when you’re free-falling

but can still pick the destination, within a couple leagues, where

you’ll break the earth with these knees, these trusting knuckles. But I’ll tell you something-

something essential died here.

…

…

I’ll keep walking.

broth

I can sense loss.

Its in me, in the shape of my wrist as I grasp for understanding.

You’re the man out, but my love is quadruplicated;

this is just the underlying economy.

What’s the trick then?

Eyes under hood:

Keeping the angles small, keeping the elbows in,

a great effort with slick hands to

conserve what can’t be stopped

bleeding through a hole.