WHEN WE WERE BREAD
By: Judith Mikesch-McKenzie
“A table without bread is not a table but bread is a table on its own.” Scottish/Gaelic Proverb
Just down the street is a bar where we gleefully joined up with
a wake for some guy’s cat -
Around six or seven long tables pulled together, singing, drinking,
telling stories about cats with
men and women we didn’t know at all. Not you-and-me “we” but
the “we” that I built my life
around before it dissolved like sugar in water.
Blocks away (or was that another town - sometimes it’s hard
to be sure of such things) was
that 50’s-ish-wanna-be soda-fountain and drugstore/market,
on the corner of 4th & Main
in the town that we both couldn’t wait to leave behind, where
you and I met up when I was home from
college and you were packed to leave, without telling
anyone but me, sitting across from me, singeing
the tall bony waitress with glances that burnt up and down
her body until she left, looking even more gray,
thin, and weary. I have always felt I owed her for that.
But I also owed you for the ways you pushed and pulled
me into life, out my window, walking thru dark
far out the highway to sit at tables in the truck stop to the
wee hours, drinking coffee while you enjoyed
the looks of the grizzled truckers at the counter, eyeing
them and grinning at me as I shrugged them off,
their muttered comments vaporizing in our disdain.
Today I looked up from my table to shout hey hon do you
remember when we got drunk with my high school
bff in my hometown? I wanted to work through my memories
with someone who’d been there, but I stopped
myself before actually shouting into the empty rooms,
because had I, I would have dissolved too.
There was the time at Moose’s Saloon late one summer
when we left our table for a girl-trip to the bathroom
to splash water, and stall-to-stall, your voice broke when you
wondered why you didn’t have someone who
treated you well, like I had, and I sat silent in my stall, because
what do you say? At the sinks I touched your
arm and you jerked back, turning to head out the door and
back to the table and the glasses awaiting us there.
We have always been silent on the story of one table, where
we sat across from her, she just 16, not quite a year
beyond us, and teased her for coloring in color books while
her baby slept, not knowing what she would do to
herself just minutes after we left her, not knowing how her
shadow would be around every table we sat from
that time on including
the table at the diner halfway between Helena and Butte
where we met up years later and the woman
at the table across wanted to know how long it’d been
since such good friends had seen each other, and
we told her, both grinning, and then told stories around
our table while your love looked on, and he
did not know how we were making ourselves and
our years into warm bread.
Judith Mikesch McKenzie has traveled much of the world, but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. She loves change - new places, new people, new challenges, but writing is her home. Her poems have been published in Wild Roof Journal, Halcyone Literary Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Elevation Review, Scribblerus, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea Valley Review, and several others. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.