281st Weekly Poetry Contest winner: Bread and Throats

by Sarah Russell

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.

See all the entrants to 281st Weekly Poetry Contest