This title is gratefully borrowed from the last line of “Recipe,” a poem by Barbara Crooker in her collection from Pittsburgh University Press, Some Glad Morning.
On Rye Toast: An Inexplicable Miracle
for fingers starving for more than bread,
for hands longing to offer again
love as food to an old mother
now isolate in the nursing home
where she will die by winter.
Tests and masks and social distance
are not enough to fell the walls
when all you want is once again
to bring her some honey and butter.
Alone you hear the cardinal sing
red and rich and full of summer
because you’ve given him fat seeds
three miles from the nursing home.
And there! The bird you’ve named Lady Jay,
snatching the peanuts you’ve put on a tray,
blue feathers flashing in clear light
as her beak breaks apart the veined pale shells
to feed and feed her fledgling young.
Katharyn Howd Machan grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut and Pleasantville, New York. She earned a B.A. in English from the College of Saint Rose, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Interpretation from Northwestern University. Since 1975 she has lived in Ithaca, New York and has been teaching writing at Ithaca College since 1977. In 2002 she was named the first Poet Laureate of Tompkins County, New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and in 40 collections, most recently Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022, competition finalist), A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020, winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Competition), and What the Piper Promised (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2018, winner of their international competition). She and her husband, fellow poet Eric Machan Howd, live joyfully with two cats, Footnote and Byron.