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Homemade



She asks me if I want raisin bread.
I don’t eat raisin bread,
just like I did not apply to law school for family law.
I am not divorce law material.
Just like I am not the straight child she asked for,
or the compliant child;
I am not the male child seeped in machismo—
he, as if over hot coals, pink soles intact.

I’ve told her before that I love her
    (banana bread).
I asked her if she wanted to sit on the front porch:
me with my coffee, she with her Midwestern mother-daughter scripts.
She says, “I’ll think about you later,”
meaning, when you are trapped in the car
with two whining children.

She thinks it will be a prison.
They do not serve raisin bread in prison.









Brittany Fonte has published three books: Buddha in My Belly (prose poetry), Fighting Gravity (YA fiction), and A.K.A. Charming (adult fiction). She also co-edited the Lambda Literary Finalist Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry. She lives in Maryland with her life and two children.