Son Flour
First, you must get a big bowl,
no,
a fat bowl. Yes, excuse me.
Fill the fat ugly bowl with flour,
you know,
the powdery, blankety stuff that sounds like muffled
gunshots when it lands.
Fill the bowl with flour, the stuff big men laugh out,
and cinnamon,
No, salt,
and flour and baking soda and vanilla and flour and flour and flour.
Fill the big,
no, sorry,
the fat ugly soft bowl with all of the ingredients:
the flour
and salt
and flour
and baking soda
and vanilla
and flour and flour and flour and flour
and mix it all! But
be sure that it is mixed with the calloused hands of your father.
This is important.
The calloused hand of your backhanded,
angry father.
Oh! I forgot to tell you!
You need to make sure that the
fatuglysoft bowl that has the flour,
you know,
the powdery, blankety stuff that sounds like muffled
suicide when it lands,
is filled with words.
The fatuglysoft bowl must be his mother’s favorite color.
Fat Ugly Soft
Anything to make him hate the bowl.
Big could mean good,
important, even. That will not do.
Yes, the son must hate what he is made in and he must speak.
He must be loud.
There are no eggs, only sperm.
You must add the vanilla, the only
wet ingredient.
It comes from your mother.
It is vital that the son is made with the subconscious understanding that his mother
would hold him while he cried,
if he wanted her to,
but he must never seek her.
He must never have the realization that the bowl is made of
love. Rough love
hidden by the sounds of the violent mixing,
your father on the cusp of making an
heir-y dough.
The son must not know that he is meant to grow into calloused hands too.
There is no cinnamon because someone might mistake it for
feminine.
Salt. There is nothing wrong with salt.
Salt is rock and hard,
useful to roads and food.
Useful to the man who lays it when needed.
As your father mixes, make sure he gets
faster and faster
with each turn of his wrist.
Make sure that he is mixing with his hands,
both of them.
No spatula, and without gloves.
Calloused hands on soft dough,
backhandedfather’sangrycallousedhands.
It is vital that your mother is in the room while he mixes.
She must only be there
to supply the vanilla.
She must remain silent
while he stirs
and grunts
and swears
and sweats.
You must be quiet too. Very quiet.
He is making your brother,
a man,
who when planted
as plush dough will grow tall and
proud,
facing the light he’ll take for granted, a
Son Flour.
Zoe Zwirlein is a freshman creative writing major with an English minor at Stony Brook University. Outside of writing, she loves to dance, crochet, paint, and run. She is from Buffalo, NY.