Saltine
How well its square
fit my palm, my mouth,
a toasty wafer slipped
onto the sick tongue
or into chicken soup,
each crisp saltine a tile
pierced with 13 holes
in rows of 3 and 2,
its edges perforated
like a postage stamp,
one of a shifting stack
sealed in wax paper
whose noisy opening
always signaled snack,
peanut butter or cheese
thick inside Premiums,
the closest we ever got
to serving hors d’oeuvres:
the redneck’s hardtack,
the cracker’s cracker.
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2012 by Michael McFee from his most recent book of poems That Was Oasis, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2012. First printed in Threepenny Review #107, Vol. 27, no. 3, (Fall 2006). Poem reprinted by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher.