Seated Nude by Jaime Altieri

How many grandmothers in the regions of memory baked bread,

their hands wrinkled white, made soft by the fine sift of flour,
their aprons smelling of leavened dough and their bosoms warm
with the rise of all that keeps a family from hunger.

And now it is bread we resist, an empty starch,
we don't want to look like our grandmothers,
big breasted, waist-less women with laughs as round
and uneven as loaves coming from wood burning stoves.

What we substitute for a diet of bread,
leaves us thin and hungry for those broad hands
that pummeled grains into shapes kneaded to memory.

If there were no more bread to be made,
what would grandmothers do with their idle hands
and all the fruit that needs to be boiled into jelly?

Laurie Kuntz is a writer and teacher living in Northern Japan. She has two poetry collections; Simple Gestures, which won the Texas Reveiw's Poetry Chapbook Contest and is published by the Texas Reveiw Press and her full length collection, Somewhere in the Telling is published by Edwin Mellen Press.

E-mail Laurie at: kuntzl@infoaomori.ne.jp