My father, home from lunch and making sandwiches by Katie Oliver

My father, home for lunch 
and making sandwiches. 

First, the bread: pre-sliced, no bother there
but then comes toasting -

all too easy to neglect and then you’re left
with charred remains. 

Cottage cheese is smeared awry,
the white curd snowy-bright 

against the blackened crusts. 
Next, tomatoes: chopped the way you’d fell a tree. 

Hacked haphazard, flung uneven on the plate
while quivering innards, jelly-red

slide wetly on the counter -
squeezed out, splattered, spent: 

a bloodied aftermath.
My mother, surveying the wreckage

of her chopping board:  Just for once, 
why can’t you let the knife do the work?

Katie Oliver writes flash fiction, poetry and short stories. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Award, and was awarded an honourable mention in the Reflex Fiction Winter Competition. She has further work published in various places including Popshot Quarterly, Molotov Cocktail, and Ellipsis Zine, and is a first reader for Forge Literary Magazine.
Twitter: @katie_rose_o