By S.J. Stover

Daily bread’s gone blue
as a tulip.  

Kitchen’s a bust—
wizened potatoes 

stacked like luck
rocks, 

beans, knobbly
as prayer beads,  

an onion’s thin
green talon.  

One cannot not live
by bread alone you say.  

Okay, so
I will live by  

sentences, tenuous,
precious, line by line, 

one rhyme
at a time.   

I will live by God’s
thin smile, hung 

crooked from
a dogwood tree. 

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S.J. Stover is a fiction writer and poet living in Boston. His writing has appeared in swamp pink and Salon magazine, and he has served as writer in residence at the Good Hart Artist Residency in Michigan. He earned his MFA from Hunter College.