[Isis]

The continents were made by dripping brine
and slapping down dough, plowed
by hands and baked
under an irregular sun --

something rare in my kitchen,
where we make tea and paper and
messes, sometimes all three.
Portfolio night is a party:
stay up, surrounded
by old shirt-canvas art.
Maybe they don't notice
in winning bread, but around book-stack
battlement I'm entrenched,
oil apples and sketched anatomy
battering 'round my head, reminders
that she hasn't painted
in sixteen damn years.

Table polished in the frenzy,
I map my worlds across it
in the morning.
There's much digging to be done
before the salt- of-my-earth
wells up,

but I grasp in anyway, afraid
to stop and never return.