After my students wrote their paragraphs,
a boy who hadn’t spoken all semester
read about being bullied at school—
he’d come home, trudged up the stairs,
and lay face down on his bed. His mother
came in and stroked his hair. A dusty shaft
of sunlight and his mom’s fingers
in his hair made him fall asleep.
Listening to that shy boy, I remembered sitting
in my grandmother’s sun-bright kitchen
the morning after my grandfather died.
I was twelve. I’d cried all I thought I could.
I watched my grandmother make biscuits,
lulled by the slow rhythmic kneading
of flour and shortening in a ceramic bowl,
her fingers tearing clumps of dough
and rolling them into balls, then patting
each down on a greased cookie sheet.
How sure she was in her making.
Later, sharing that bread with her, I knew
I was supposed to feel sad, but instead felt
something closer to joy, a warm biscuit
in my hand, a pat of butter melting in its center,
and my grandmother shockingly—startlingly—alive
sipping her coffee and reading a newspaper.
Sara Pirkle Hughes teaches literature and writing at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia. Her book, The Disappearing Act, won the 2016 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and will be published in 2018. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net Anthology, and the Independent Best American Poetry Award. She has received writing fellowships from I-Park Foundation and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.