SLICE OF MORNING by Mary Elder Jacobsen

SLICE OF MORNING

I’m waking to a sky
dark as chocolate ganache
swirled by the great baker,
her sparkly spatula,
her flourish of icing,
between bright coconut-
fluff layers of snow days
she’s stacked up one by one,
yesterday then today,
and soon I remember
the slice of cake sent home
after last night’s party
and I’m up like the sun,
first to rise out of bed
down the dim-lit stairwell
followed by the dog, star
of our world. How is it
he can beg shamelessly
for more? His bowl is full.
We are not unalike
after all. Let me slice
this last piece of sweet cake
in half and leave the rest.
Let me keep wanting more.

*

Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry appears widely in online and print publications, most recently in The Greensboro Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthology The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, edited by James Crews. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she holds graduate degrees from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and UNC-Greensboro. She lives in Vermont, where she is a freelance editor, a community volunteer, and Coordinator of Words Out Loud, an annual reading series held at a still-unplugged 1823 meetinghouse.