I don’t think I have a poem for open mic night, but I have to say I’m enjoying everyone else’s. However, I will do my best and offer up a haiku:

Butter, so creamy
Why must you stick to my hips?
I need to diet

irreverent baking

I should be upstairs with the others, drumming up ways
to heal the world, save the animals, pray for water
in a far-off continent, devote the remainder of my days
to a catalog of restorations. But this morning, it was the matter
of scones that drew my gaze, and my feet remained
planted in the kitchen. One must never ignore the instinct
to create, is what I told myself, and soon the counter was stained
with flour, my hands sticky with dough, the house inked
with the smell of blueberry possibility, and I knew I was not wrong.
This was my prayer, my act of healing, my offering, my song.
-maya stein (http://papayamaya.blogspot.com)

Apple Slices by Todd Boss

—eaten right
off the jackknife in
moons, half moons,
quarter moons and
crescents—

still
summon common
summer afternoons
I spent as my dad’s
jobsite grunt, framing
future neighbors’
houses out of 2×4s
and 4×6s,

and our
brief and silent pick-
up tailgate lunch-
box lunch breaks
of link sausage,
longhorn cheddar,
larder pickles, cold
leftover roast-beef-
and-butter sandwiches
wrapped in paper,
a couple of pippins
from the Fall Crick
Pick-n-Save, and—
flavored of tin from
the lip of the cup
of a dented thermos
passed between us—
a hard-earned share
of still-chill well
water…

Now
so many waned and
waxed moons later,
another well-paid,
well-fed, college-
bred paper-pusher, I
wonder that I’ve never
labored harder, nor
eaten better.

“Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past.” ~ Old Dutch proverb

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Kiss me with mangoes, still on your lips
embrace me with dewberries clinging
woo me when winds of morning are birds softly singing
Hold me while summer cherries
are red as the reddest wine
and sun-ripe scuppernongs turn bronze upon a swaying vine
Caress me where wild strawberries crush
beneath our dancing feet
and where pomegranates hang like love, intricately sweet

An FYI- a scuppernong is a grape native the the SE United States, and dewberries are closely related to blackberries.