Sophia Friis
BISCUIT POEM

Bitch I.

An animal, let’s say
my dog, has issues
with the end of the world.

She’s lined the back porch
in plastic bottles
to collect moon water

to pour in a juice glass
to drink with breakfast
to douse her children with you are

holy.
In our side garden,
the bees

lap it up like Mountain Dew.
Inside a church,
the pendulumic golden bowl

of donation passes while the soul sits
like an ephemeral burrito
in the abdomen or thorax. These

are her meditations.

Bitch II.

Here wet heat wrinkles
the ridges of stretch marks,
a bellied tomato

vines rot at the speed
of a sleeve of ash,
humidity

stills in a woman’s
vertebra, they’re all sleeping
with their chiropractors.

This is the after.
Man,
left her high and dry as a leather saddle.

Her poems
used to be of
overwhelmingly this

the yellow green of tannery water,
marrow, oily eyes.
Bury a skull, any skull

and cavernous tomatoes
will walk from the fields,
red valves onto pavement.

Bitch III.

Everyone knows how
a biscuit should sit
in the hand. Sage gravied,

say grace-full spring onions
the second largest beginnings.
Here,

the order goes
seed, bulb, biscuit
all split open the same way,

steaming, such delicately constructed
biology. We used
your mother’s recipe.

Over the phone, she and I
spoke of ham hock,
jaws, a creaminess

that could be the inner thigh
of almost spent milk,
the expiration dates.

◊◊

Sophia Friis is from South Carolina and a current undergrad at Furman University for a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work appears in the Barely South Review and the Yellow Chair Review. She keeps bees.

Image credit: Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #27.