Those who cannot love themselves
… eat a terrible bread.
–W.S. Merwin
You beg kisses from stones,
purse lips to poison cups,
bleed to cutting words.
Smiles fester in your face.
You commiserate, and wait.
You have a “heart of gold.”
For speech, you stammer–
he said, he said, he said–
leftovers and dry pieces.
Girlfriend, that wine is too sour,
that crumb too stale. Let us go now
to that secret house where love is
common as oatmeal, common as air,
where wine flows dark and sweet,
where bread rises hot
and perfect in the pan.
Priscilla Long was honored with a 2006 National Magazine Award for best feature writing for “Genome Tome,” which appeared in The American Scholar. Her work also appears in Ontario Review, Under the Sun, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Seattle Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Raven Chronicles, Passages North, The Chattahoochee Review, First Intensity, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. She is author of Where the Sun Never Shines: a History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (Paragon House, 1989). Other awards include The Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Richard Hugo House Founder’s Award, awards from the Seattle and Los Angeles arts commissions, and the Mary Roberts Reinhart Fund poetry award. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington, teaches writing, and serves as Senior Editor of the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, www.historylink.org .