Pizza

you can listen to this poem here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn9T1LNf-Dk&t=36s

I only have to breathe for my daughter to roll her eyes in annoyance. But I am also her home.

We navigate the space around each other with great caution.

There’s a Ghanaian saying, “only the closest person to you, can step on your toes”

With her friends, she’s a wild kaleidoscope. With me she’s a Black-hole of silence.

Happiness was as simple as throwing a blanket over two chairs, and all kinds of adventures came alive in our imagination, but with breasts came contempt.

On good days we make pizza. We stand side by side at the marble kitchen counter, mirroring each other’s hands, stretching and kneading, stretching and kneading, the dough compliant and supple in our palms, its soft feminine roundness, satisfying.

We take turns peering in on the orange furnace glow. Hungrily waiting for the pale crust to turn golden and crisp.

The cutting marks etched on the pizza pan grow more pronounced.

 In her fourteen year old eyes, I see the defiant woman elbowing her way out of the girl, and feel the wet pounding of my heart.

 The resemblance is not only in our sand colored skin, or our jet black hair, but the turning of the head, the lowering of the eye, the left arm holding the right elbow for comfort.

 She’s fourteen, I am forty. When I am sixty six, I want to stand side by side with my forty year old self again, stretching and kneading, stretching and kneading, the knife tracks on the pizza pan deeper and irreconcilable.

  But by then she’ll know, that to love a child is to forever be in anguish, yearning, and elation.