Bread and Throats

Knives cut both bread and throats,
and what woman, on occasion, slicing
a fresh-baked loaf, fragrant in a kitchen warm
as an old sweater, when a husband invades
from work with a self too big, too important,
too other to slow for the aroma of afternoon labor,
arms flour-powdered and tired from kneading,
and him so rushed and out of step with kitchen pace
and peace, what woman has not looked at that knife
and thought about the difference in texture between bread
and throat, prickly with 5pm bristle, a slice through skin
more firm than the chicken she deboned for dinner, the pesky
sinew, hitting bone, searching for the notch between vertebrae.
 

​                                             First published in Unsheathed