2017.4 - Proof

Gather your ingredients,
Vital as bricks
No, not bricks.
Mortar?
No.

Gather your ingredients.
Flour, water, maybe milk,
A touch of salt
He always added salt, didn’t he?
A pinch.
The time he stopped the factory line,
The bread sullied by its lack.
Always have salt on hand.

Wash your hands.
Grate the cheese.
No, wait.
Later.

Cook the bacon.
Thick and curling into
Slabs.
You should cut the bacon.
Before you cook the bacon
Cut the bacon.
Chop.
Thick ribbons ready to
Or
Now there is raw meat

Wash your hands
Wash the knife
It is the wrong knife for bacon
Or the wrong knife for cheese
It is your only sharp knife.

Wash everything,
Set the bacon to fry,
Scrub.
A simmer of curls and
The gentlest change of colour
Deep pink to mid pink
Under the nails
And white to
Still white.

Prod the unchanging white
You should.
You should chop off the fat
They say nowadays
They say “womanly”
And “comfortable”
And “healthy”
And “well-rounded”
And she said “fat”
And she said.
And she said “fat.”
Flat and glistening as a
Curse word

Take the brown bacon,
Place it in a dish.
Chop more meat.
Apply heat.
Watch it like a hawk,
A spatula-wielding hawk,
Sharp as grassblades.
Remove from the heat at
Exactly the right moment.

Take the flour and water,
Or maybe milk
Or... both?
The book says to sieve.
He never sieved.
Never measured,
A lifetime of eye,
Fingertips wise as
Wanting

Mix things together.
Butter should be cold
Folded in but
Your fingertips are not wise
And your shoulder aches sometimes
And the machine waits
Bladed like a brace of scimitars
Watched by two extra pairs of bright eyes
As the sound skirls into a wince of whirling
That signals completion
In a fleshy thump.

Keep them clear of the edges,
Set them to observe,
Still as scientists
Wriggling on the edge of understanding.
The elder, narrating,
Fingers itching to be into the mix
The younger, absorbing
Then dawdling away
While the elder stays,
Straying to sharpness.

Ignore that part of the recipe.
It calls for ingredients that
Normal people call nutrition
But the elder child writhes at,
Skin blistering.
Substitute milk
Always milk.
This week the younger
Still likes milk.

Thump and roll.
Wood clatters, folding the
Machine-rolled lump
Into something like
Something like what wise fingers can do
Glistening
Too much fat?
Everything yellow in this
Kitchen, still redolent
Of its previous incumbents
It does not smell like home.

Press the flattened lump
Into your glass dish,
The one with the lid,
Lift the soft bacon,
Let it flop and slither into
Its new home.
Soon there will be cheese.

Battle the heat-softened cheese
Into the grater,
Ingratiating skin into the mix.
The grater stands sturdy,
Foursquare,
Pristine on three smug sides.
After a while there is enough cheese.

Make a roof for the pie
It is now a pie
The roof is a lid is scraps
Held together with milk and wishing
and the chink of the glass fitting
Your cheeks feel red,
Your shoulder and back ache
Your knees feel swollen
Your fingers shake.
But, for the next thirty minutes
You will only be waiting.
And washing.
And waiting
As the oven roars and blinks.

Sit them down.
Gather them around,
Lift the lid,
See the salt smell envelope them,
Pale as pastry.
Worth the waiting.
“What’s this?”
“Bacon and cheese pie.”
“Again?”
“I don’t like it.”
Watch him cover his in black grit
Watch them poke and pick
Your cheeks still red
Your back still aching.


I’m still playing, unusually for me, with prompts from the NaPoWriMo site. The last couple were “a recipe” and “an elegy”, and somewhere between the bus and home the images became a curious mixture of the two.