Dessert Is Not the End, poem by Anne Harding Woodworth (MY SWEET WORD Series)

Dessert Is Not the End
by Anne Harding Woodworth

The night we made s’mores
our lives slid into each other further,

closing the gap of our childhoods—
parallel lines distanced by miles

of prairieriversandgreatlakes over separate campfires,
separate hearths in those days. Yet there was a sharing

of chocolatemeltedmarshmallowandgrahamcrackers.
An uncomplicated recipe is not forgotten—

like the taste of coalescence, a sliding
of something into an opening, sweet, dark and light,

soft and heated and held within sturdy walls—
you and me, at last folding the child

into the story of all these years—
and wishing for s’more, just a few more.

PHOTO: Anne and Fred in the 1950s. They did not know each other as children.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her persona poems in the voice of a woman who dreads being confined in her old age morphed into a one-woman play, Hannah Alive, in which Hannah reminisces about her childhood, her marriage, her art, all the while contemplating alternatives to a “rest home.” Harding Woodworth, mother of two professional soccer players, married Fred Woodworth in her late forties. Visit her at annehardingwoodworth.com.

Contemplating Dessert by Ki Russell (I Am Waiting Poetry Series)

CONTEMPLATING DESSERT
by Ki Russell

Cinnamon ice cream melts
                                                along the sliver
                           of hot peach that pokes
above a cobbler roof.
                           Milky dribbles slide beneath
                                                the pastry,
swirl in syrup
                           and spiral through the dessert.

My spoon waits.
I am caught watching my confection destroy
the ice cream. An inevitable death by heat.
Not death, but transformation, the napkin assures me.
The liquid state suits the ice cream:
returns it to something akin
to the original form
before all of the salt
and freezing pails
paddled it up.
Go ahead, the spoon whispers,
cut in. Fulfill the dish’s purpose.
Stop waiting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ki Russell teaches writing, literature, and creative writing at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, where she resides with her husband and two children, Rook and Ashe. Her hybrid genre novel The Wolf at the Door was released in August 2014 by Ars Omnia. Her full-length poetry collection Antler Woman Responds was released in June 2014 by Paladin Contemporaries, and in 2011 Medulla Publishing released her chapbook How to Become Baba Yaga. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.