After The Bread Is Gone Shenan Prestwich

Shenan Prestwich After The Bread Is Gone

“The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlivened with champagne.” -Samuel Johnson

Love is like being enlivened with champagne, yes, everything rises, everything is light and furious, bright and deadly and devil-may-care, everything is spices you’ve never tasted and colors you’d never pluck from roots growing in your backyard, when it’s new at least, when it settles it’s more like stout, richer, slower, more opaque, like a chair pulled up to a well-worn bar with names etched so deep they can’t be shaved down without shaving straight through the wood, or up to a fire, a pleasant, sleepy fever, though one that can be alarming at the touch of a draft from a suddenly open door, waking you, an ale whose body and milky head can be deceivingly light, leaving you wondering at old, oakey barley wines and saisons with the funk and tease of springtime tongues rolling. But stout is nourishing after the bread is gone.

Resentment is like eating too many red onions that climb acrid up your throat hours later. Sadness is choking on whatever you eat. I am a tomato and you’re a sharp knife, and you’re a pat of butter and I’m a pan, or a pool of olive oil with cheese scattered like confetti on its surface and you’re a glass of wine that cuts through the fat and calms the burn of a balsamic floating through me. Mostly we’re the crumbs in each others’ pockets, and meeting you? Like muzzling my hand lunging always towards the bread basket after swallowing my first pumpernickel roll, still hungering for dishes that hadn’t made their way yet to my table, drifting constantly to tear off one more bite of crust. But stout is nourishing after the bread is gone.

Chinese Christmas Julian Joseph Jackson

“Jeremy!” Jamez Chang & Isaac Kirkman

He waited for his chance to play. In front of a sold-out crowd, from the nosebleed section, they saw the figure on Madison paint, and anyone could see that his stare was past hungry.

He had traveled many miles in Ducky-green jerseys to watch x’s and o’s on white squeaky boards get erased within minutes.

Harvard long-forgotten, for this morning, Jeremy woke up stiff-necked, under-studied, sleeping off buddy Landry’s couch, and still J-Lin waited.

In the front row last chair on Madison Square basketball gardens flower in front of him, without him He watched.

Until the moment Coach whistled him over, both jobs on the ropes, the older one thinking:

Oh, what the hell… Mash it, mix it, strudel up a point guard, person-off waiver and play-maker claimed.

Between bedsheets twisted like folds of paper birds perched atop our peaks the word arises, a blanket white bulb of light. We say we do not know what it really means, half-squinting at the sunlight’s stream. We busy ourselves by digging holes, dismantling faucets, opening bank accounts, building houses, brick by brick while the word saunters past us on the dog tag of your neighbor’s old Huskie, such bright blue eyes, the word has; numbing.

At times you are reminded of the last time you bathed your own dog, before the lethal injection, how weak, too weak, to stand on his own so you put your hands beneath his rib-cage and scrubbed the thin wire of his spine. You scrubbed hard, determined to send him off clean, even getting the hollowed, in-between parts he used to nip at you for grazing but in his illness acquiesced, yes, yielded to your soft touch. You licked him like a mother bear, drying him until the word sprung up into twisted white coils of fur: holy, these moments. . You dug his grave. You sanctified it with the wet of your eyes. You packed the earth back in like a warm kiss, then went inside and turned off all the lamps, flicked the switches, as if in suffering we are not uncertain, not pushing away the word, pushing away the light, but tunneling through the dark crawl spaces of the earth, looking for a more enduring one.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens birch trees

Crisscrossed birch trees

grew. A barrier between you and me.

X marked our spot.

Bits of paper trash and shiny foil

sandwiched between sturdy trunk bottoms were not

enough to mark a path.

We could see the road but couldn’t budge,

stuck in our muddy gut swamp

of contempt.

I guess we won’t die together.

So buy a dog. Then you can say now we’re out of the woods.

This morning I saw the way fall moves in— in rainstorms, coaxing the already yellowed leaves to the pavement, as if having them underfoot were so different. When was the last time I looked at green and said it was lovely?

On the subway I look for green and find it in a cigarette add, in the print of a woman’s pleated skirt. Underground, I can’t smell the sweet sap like when I noticed for the first time the trees were leaking— putting my fingers to the bark, I thought, this is a tree’s inside.

I catch myself rubbing my fingers together and wonder if syrup still drips from those maples: the trees of home seem far away like summer and crisp grass. Now people thrust their hands deep into pockets as if they were holding themselves together or holding something off...

Sitting on a park bench, I can’t even feel the wood pressing against the small of my back. The man who lives next door walks by, and I am suddenly ashamed: I don’t even know his name, how important it is to say this is the first day of fall, this bench is green.