For years it rested beneath the pantry’s
floating shelves, sap-sticky with spills:

hot honey and rice slipped from the bag.
Then, behind the giant soup pot I used only once,

to brine a turkey the way my mother used to
on my first Thanksgiving without her—Prussian blue

and dented, speckled like a bird egg. Later, I wedged it
beside the pasta maker and its many attachments,

another thing I never knew I wanted
until she gave it to me, as if to say I was worthy

of time-saving, of a homemade dough I didn’t have to knead.
For weeks, it sat in the box of waiting donations,

where each time I bent down to haul it away, a stone
fell down the back of my throat.

Crusted with the bread I cultivated, crumb
of wheat, of banana, of oatmeal, from when I lived

alone in the rat house behind the landlord’s five-bedroom,
pretending his black creek was my black creek,

that his chimney’s columns of smoke
were my columns of smoke. She showed up

at my door with a box of new cutlery, knives so clean
I saw my face in them, with new dish cloths I had never

thought to need. She set the appliance on the green
tile countertop like a bouquet of roses.

I heard it whir, warm with promise, loud as rain.
A memory so delicate it flakes in my hand.