Cracking

Every kitchen edge was her tool:
the side of the sink, a rim
of a mixing bowl, the round lip
of a measuring cup. Snapping
her wrist my mother could break
an egg with a single flick, pull apart
shells so that a stray thumb
would never slip into the yolk.
Yellow suns like those
in my crayon-colored pictures
fell into frying pans or mixing bowls.
Circles were never punctured,
but with every toss of broken shell,
her skin grew thinner. Veins bulged,
deep fate lines cut into her hands.
This is where I learned that
a clean break starts with a tiny
fracture, and then a crack.

Karen J. Weyant’s first full-length collection, Avoiding the Rapture was published last fall by Riot in Your Throat press. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx and Slipstream. She lives, reads and writes in Northern Pennsylvania but is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.