Anne Graue

I am not quite ready to leave 

because leaving would mean losing time spent watching The Great British Baking Show and would mean I would miss watching someone bake and construct a 3-tier meringue or a gingerbread pub with stained glass windows and a sticky sweet floor or watching someone leave their bread dough
to prove, knowing that proving is everything, such as the difference between having or not having enough air, between rising or not rising enough
for it to become the bread it needs to be, the bread which can be pulled apart without much force and shared with little fanfare or the need for anything
to drink, but most of all, I would miss the failures: the dough that didn’t rise, the jam that wouldn’t quite set, the walls of all of the gingerbread houses that refused to stand no matter how much icing glue held them together, and the accidental use of salt when sugar was clearly called for.

Anne Graue lives in New York and is the author of Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), and has published poems in literary journals and anthologies, including The Book of Donuts (Terrapin Books), the Plath Poetry Project, Random Sample Review, and Rivet Journal.