Bobby Steve Baker

One Flesh                           

kitchen floor linoleum

worn thin

gramma’s        

uncomplaining preparation

of one meal decades long

always a smile on her round  face

she bore 13 children

nine lived

they stayed close so she

never stopped cooking for the farm

most of the food fresh picked or slaughtered

or preserved in the root cellar in winter

grampa held court

from his chair at the head of the table

or worked in his wood shop

he lost one lung

to a first growth maple he felled

near the Manitoba border

clearing land for the Trans-Canada

when he could walk he started back to work

a life-long railroad man

never missed a day through

the whole depression

no one argued politics

with the railroad man

the Conservative party ruled his world

and made for TV Wrestling was real

perhaps that careful breathing

allowed the ash on his roll your own

dangling from the corner of his mouth

to grow to well beyond an inch

before it fell unnoticed on his bib overalls

as we worked wood in his shop

always something just for me

being the only male child

of a male child

I was his favorite of course

or so I thought until

I found out all 29 grandchildren

were his favorite

their house floated like a dream 

the pantry  the root cellar  the smell of butter-scotch and peppermint

there was a multi-panel stained glass border

to the kitchen door

that changed the world by changing view

enchanting to a ten-year-old

ruby corn fields   deep magenta beans  

rippled yellow apples—

sometimes I still see through it

only once did I hear

the diminutive patriarch

call his wife anything but Mother

that was when at ninety 

he launched himself into her casket

crying  Hattie   Hattie   don't leave me

my uncles got him out

the funeral proceeded

he went home

went to bed    for one month

then to her

CP

Bobby Steve Baker is a Cosmetic Surgeon in Lexington, KY, having grown up on the Canadian side of Lake Huron. He holds an MFA from National University in San Diego. He has published in many literary journals in Canada and the USA including Grey Sparrow, The Boston Literary Magazine, and The Ann Arbor Review. He has published two Chapbooks of poetry, Numbered Bones from Accents Publishing and The Taste of Summer Lightning from Finishing Line Press. He splits his time between Kentucky and Southern Ontario with the comings and goings of five boys and a very large Airedale.