Granddaughter of the American Can Company

1989, Ybor City, Florida 
You can make bread out of just flour and water,
my grandmother says, as she wipes the heat
from all the sweltering Florida had been doing
from her face. I am all of seven.
I have not yet been asked to make something from nothing,
so I don’t understand what she is telling me.
It will take me years to learn that being poor in the South
is different from being poor anywhere else.

When I ask her what my grandfather did,
she tells me he made cans for the American Can Company.
I ask her this often because I like the way
she says American, and the way that can sounds after American,
like an echo, like something that bears repeating.
At this age, repetition is something I understand. 
I go to a school where we pledge to the flag every day,
and I am in awe of what it means to love your country,
so much that you can stand still and say the same thing
day after day, never growing tired of hearing it.
I eat the same ham and cheese sandwich before recess every day. 
Only it’s on bread my grandmother made, so it’s not exactly the same, 
its shape and size varying, depending on how much time she had. 

At least that's how I remember it now.
When I think back on those days I spent, 
trailing her skirts in the kitchen, tippytoeing to reach
ingredients from the smallest of her kitchen cabinets, 
I kick myself for not asking her what those cans held.
What I wanted to hear her say,
though, I just didn’t know it yet, was food we couldn't afford.
Instead, she tells me of the early days of her marriage, 
when time was the one thing that was hers. 
Her husband away, creating space for others
to hold what was not ours, she was left alone, 
just the one baby on her hip,
to knead and pull, knead and p u l l. knead and p  u  l  l.

2024, Burbank, California

I have two free hands and no babies.
There is a box of banana bread mix
sitting on my kitchen counter.
It rests inside a glass baking dish,
ready to be born and blossom within
the very vessel in which it sits.
It, like me, has so much potential.

When I moved, I carried it just like that
from one house to the next,
telling myself every day that I'd finally make it.
Every time I see it, I think surely it must be expired.
Somehow, it’s not, a silent reminder in my life
that there’s still time.

Part of me wonders if I can’t or won’t make it
because it requires more than water.
Butter and oil are plentiful now,
but I can’t bring myself to use them.
It’s as if making food with more than
the simplest ingredient, water,
is somehow a betrayal of my grandmother
and her ability to make bread and hold babies.

I remind myself that I betray her at every turn
in this modern life, when I, an atheist,
struggle to bring in the heavy, overflowing takeout bags
from the front porch and complain,
Thank God, I was starving to death.

When I finally make the bread,
when I stir in things other than water,
will I finally understand
what my grandmother was telling me?

I wonder if making words,
instead of bread, should be a crime.