We like it a little gritty, a food that stands up
for itself, a food that will lie down for the butter
or whatever else comes off your knife. This shallow
altar and you the god to whom the offering. Used to be
bread on a fork before GE got involved. Used to be
something your mother slid on your plate next to
the eggs. Bridesmaid of breakfast—warm, a little rough,
a place for your teeth to convene. After she died,
we met at a restaurant. I wore sunglasses throughout
the meal. I did not order toast which would have
spoken to me of every morning in my mother’s house.
Toast
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.