Tonight's Poet Corner: Yolk

Yolk
by Belinda Roddie

Whisking a bleeding eye and letting the cream soak in,
dipping hot oil into hot oil into hot oil, seeping in the corners of
tear ducts leaking harsh, white fluids. They let the stuff gel in a
cylindrical appreciation of the culinary art of
cold cadavers, plucking bones from frosty glass,
simmering souls in carbon steel.


When it cools, they serve it like a pageant for the altar,
a fattened calf, a sleekened sheep, a bloated ball of blubber
for the undertaking. Not to eat, just to look at, and
admire, and let grow lukewarm until it's dead.


Mom, I don't like what they made for the bake sale. The
cupcakes are stale and the frosting turns to dust particles in my
all too eager mouth. When I lick away blue icing, it turns gray
and petrifies on the tongue. The cookies are dry and the lemonade drier.
They always offer broken crackers and cheese. Sometimes
doughnuts and cold coffee. The tea's
not much better. The hot cocoa's ninety percent water.
The water's even worse.


Pancakes dinners offer more pan than cake. More fluff than air.
More prayer than action. They don't have enough syrup.
And the mimosas aren't really mimosas. Just orange juice.
Just the sweet and tart and overt sugary burn of thoughts
they want you to have. Champagne is not a "poison"
that they wish to pick.


But it's okay. You keep cooking what you cook,
baking what you bake, making snow with white flour when
the blizzard's really brown. Stir the whites. Liquefy the lards.
Crack the eggs all you want, and stir in that yolk,
because the God they've cooked up in their skulls is
a God I don't know.