Far from Butter.

• Author: Schmidt, Lauren
• Position: Poem

I scrub my hands clean three times. Antiseptic soap stings my fingers; its stink burns my eyes and they water. I stand behind the waist-high table in the kitchen with offerings of butter, half-frozen sticks of must-be-used today butter, stacked sticks of unfit-for-sale butter. This evening, I must cut them into even pats, each the width of a nickel, one pat per visitor. The butter is so cold that I must lean my weight on the spine of a meat cleaver to force the blade through until it touches the table. A deep ridge forms across my palms like a lash mark. Looking at my hands, pink and swollen, it is clear that I lack the strength to cut through this wealth of refrigerated butter, much less the strength to make it. I lack the patience to wait for milk and cream to pull their bodies apart from their emulsive embrace so the cream can rest on top. I lack the precision it takes to skim that thick collection at the hem where cream and milk meet. My forearms are too slight to press into the belly of that wad of fat for it to release its milk. I don't have the shoulders to churn that butter, or the hands to give it its texture. It is only in feeling a bar begin to melt beneath my warm grip, like a muscle grown weak, that...