Before the Cake
Carrots
bleed their sugars to the grater. In the half-light from the kitchen window, ants crawl over the table, licking up crusted honey. We sweep carrot peels out the front door.
Eggs
come in on the sorting belt, clumped in dirt and shit and little feathers, dragging cobwebs from the shadowy corners of the laying house. Sometimes the shells are so soft they break in my hand. Some come smeared with too much blood to clean: these are for us. I try not to see the blood when I crack the eggs into the batter.
Flour,
a white fingerprint on your cheek. Like flour tossed in the air, daylight bleaches the summer’s flora. Our eyes are dull to the red-bellied spider, to the green tomatoes tugging on the vine.
Sugar
scattered on the tabletop.
Salt:
we crave it like cows lowering their monstrous tongues to the blood-pink salt lick, like goats licking sweat from our palms.
Cinnamon
fallen from the shelf, tossing copper clouds in the air.
Cloves,
a sharp note in the batter. From clou, meaning nail. We feed the dried flower buds to the spice grinder’s blade.
Butter
in the walk-in fridge. We stand on our toes and plunge our hands into the electric churn, into the wet butter jumping beneath our fingers.
Walnut
shells fly across the room.
Orange flower
in whipped cream, your favorite, which I mistook for bergamot. We talk about the bright bodies of words: skin, flower, peel; orange rinds opening into blossom. I imagine flowers climbing into our mouths, stealing our breath. Outside, it is darkening.
Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has recently appeared in The Emerson Review, jmww, MudRoom, and The Ekphrastic Review.
