Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Junkyard Post Two Week Two
The Italian girl, a student here at the vocational school, dressed head to toe in white, shifts her chef's hat back to center as she sighs, looks to her friend, back to me, opens her mouth, closes it, and sighs again. In front of her, on the table, lies a pile of flour in the shape of a bowl. In the valley of the flour mound lies four eggs and on the rim of the mound, piles of sugar topped with hunks of butter. It's the second time I've seen butter in Italy. The first was in our cook's kitchen while assembling an apple cake. Butter isn't found here, as isn't measuring utensils. My fellow American baker states that "the Americans would flip if they were here," or something like that. I laugh and the students turn and stare at us, not sure if they should smile and laugh or not. I focus my attention to the professor dressed in a black chef's coat- she wants me to be violent with this dough. Kneading as violently as I can, I pull away from the dough, acutely aware of the layer of fat that coats my hands and nails, itching to wash. As I bubble the soap, I take a minute to turn and look about the kitchen, watching the Italians maneuver delicately around the Americans, us just trying to stay out of their way.
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It seems like you're making the leap to prose pretty well, but I guess that makes sense since your poems are very narrative-driven. And yet, I can still seem some of your poetry training in here. You're still very careful about condensing everything into a small space, even though you now have that space to expand. I love the sentence: "It's the second time I've seen butter in Italy." It was a cool mechanism to jump off to another point, a memory of a different time. Plus, I just liked how jarring and out of place it felt when I read it. There was a small instance of heightened language: "My fellow American baker," which may seem a little picky, but this moment stood out to me because it didn't fit in with the rest of the piece, language-wise. You could try to bring it down by calling her a friend, something that shows you're familiar with her in this foreign atmosphere, so we can separate her from the character that can't speak the same language. Also, another small, picky moment: you have "violent" in the piece in connecting sentences down towards the end.
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