Jill Michelle
Haibun for Cookie-cutter Divorces
Mom navigates the grocery cart down the commissary aisles while I sit up front, tight-covered legs dangling from square metal holes, fingers plucking animal crackers from the red Barnum box with its drawn bars holding back the circus-ready beasts who seem to lose all ferocity when baked into sugary treats. Mama lion downgraded to clown-collared dog. Prowling leopards reduced to beige blobs.
My brother munches creatures from a matching pack, trooping the market’s epoxied floors in blue rain boots alongside Mom as she tosses butter, bread, ice-creams and meats into the basket with little thought, unlike next spring when there will be no more Dad, no lessons, no grocery trips without the calculator. No extras, as Mom puts it, like those cookie boxes we pass now.
summer’s oven
bakes us into animal
cracker children
My brother munches creatures from a matching pack, trooping the market’s epoxied floors in blue rain boots alongside Mom as she tosses butter, bread, ice-creams and meats into the basket with little thought, unlike next spring when there will be no more Dad, no lessons, no grocery trips without the calculator. No extras, as Mom puts it, like those cookie boxes we pass now.
summer’s oven
bakes us into animal
cracker children
Biography
Jill Michelle's (she/her) latest poems appear/are forthcoming in Hole in the Head Review, Ibbetson Street, Sheila-Na-Gig online, SWWIM Every Day and Valley Voices. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.
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