"Flour, Milk & Salt" by Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017),  dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.   ​

---

FLOUR, MILK & SALT
     after Celestia Morgan

flour
          a universe is born between her brown hands—flour, a cloud of Southern
          possibility when she makes it hover and sigh. how this could become our
          sustenance is magic, is Jesus making bread to outlast bread. what God but
          a mother’s hands? what a prayer in the biscuit dough clinging to itself,
          readied for the fire?

milk
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          you gave your life so that I might live--

salt
          they say it will kill us, silent as it is. salt as it is. how it makes our blood so
          deadly in our veins. how it, tableside, can be a weapon, even if it makes
          the meal sing. a death song for me and my people. precursor to diabetes,
          ​that great southern meal.