Before dawn cracks its yolk over the kitchen sill,
her knuckles bloom white in the flour cloud—
a storm in a ceramic bowl.
Sugar grains dissolve like forgotten constellations
in the well of warm milk she pours,
swirling with yeast’s quiet alchemy.
This is how we measure time:
not by clocks, but the stretch of gluten,
the sigh of dough beneath a damp cloth.
Her palms press valleys into the yielding mass,
mine, small and tentative, follow
the landscape of her movements—
ridge and furrow, heel and crescent fold.
We knead silence into elastic gold,
palm to palm, a language without vowels.
Cinnamon freckles the rolled-out canvas,
brown sugar rivers darkening under our spread thumbs.
Her wrist’s map of veins, blue as twilight,
guides the knife slicing ribbons of coiled years.
In the oven’s breath, they swell—
slow serpents of steam curling from fissures,
carrying the scent of burnt sugar and patience.
Later, at the scarred oak table,
she breaks a braid apart.
Butter melts into honeycomb crevices.
My fingers, sticky with proof,
mirror the tremor in hers
as she lifts a piece to my mouth.
The taste: wheat and woodsmoke,
a century-knotted apron string
still warm around us both.
When she smiles,
flour dusts her cheek
like the ghost of every Sunday
before this one.