; Ingredients

; 

At five years old, I wondered

how to spell letters. How do you spell “h” or “u”?

I asked my elders.

 

In the corners of a classroom,

I sat gouging notebooks, hoping to break

      sounds.

I uncrossed Ts, threw balls from Is, 

and smashed Ms into kindling.

 

My teacher couldn’t answer. Who pulls

the puppetmaster’s strings?

she wondered in private.

 

;

When I was little,

I thought making things from scratch 

meant making the ingredients: 

scraping the earth into troughs, 

planting wheat, sprinkling water, grinding flour,

picking sugar cane

 

I still catch myself thinking 

using store-bought flour is cheating.

 

; 

Levine’s angel butcher¹

wields his cleaver to

dissect a child like a flower

 

After the butcher’s legs finish

jumping and twitching

    he’ll notice he can’t 

remove fog from the boy’s

retinas.

   He can’t filet and cook

the storm 

      into summer

 

;

 Capture a firefly in a mason

    jar

to admire and examine its glow.

As hours pass and it flickers fast 

     understand 

its battery will die and

your room will be dark.

 

The bug will be dead

in a jar that smells of spaghetti

and you still won’t know how

it broke the dark.

 

¹Levine, Philip. “Angel Butcher.” New Selected Poems.  New York: Knopf Doublesday, 2011. Print.