March Slice of Life No. 20

I am participating in Laura Shovan’s “Annual February Daily Poem Project” which we are doing in March this year. We are writing in response to food prompts. Today’s prompt was posted by Molly Hogan:

Day 19–Sticky buns or alternatively, any sort of gooey breakfast treat…

I decided to write a skinny.

What is a skinny?
Skinny poem form: Exactly 11 lines; line 1 can be several words, but short is best; lines 2 through 10 are one word each; lines 2, 6, and 10 must repeat; line 11 must use the same words as line 1 but they can be in a different order. Read more about its origin here.

I began by brainstorming a list of associated words: cinnamon, honey, rolls, yeast, yummy, coffee, breakfast, sweet, favorite, smell, aroma, kitchen, wafting, filling, warm, baking, dreamy, oven…

I decided to use “sticky bun” as my repeated line. Since it is an open compound noun, I can count it as a single word, right?

1
2 sticky bun
3
4
5
6 sticky bun
7
8
9
10 sticky bun
11

Then I played around with the idea of smell, baking in the kitchen, and sweet rolls… and came up with the line: “Sweetness wafting through my kitchen.” I played with the words a bit to see if the order could be easily changed for line 11 and came up with, “Wafting sweetness through my kitchen” I added the idea “your” so as to speak to the sticky bun, like we sometimes do in odes.

1 Your sweetness wafting through my kitchen
2 sticky bun
3
4
5
6 sticky bun
7
8
9
10 sticky bun
11 Wafting your sweetness through my kitchen

I played with the other words, thought about something I’ve tried before– using hyphenated words for my “single word” lines. I ended up with the following six:

• favored-breakfast because it is a favorite
• honey-glazed because the sticky mess can have honey in it and they are shiny like glazed doughnuts
• morning-dream because I rarely have them, so they are like a dream in the morning
• coffee-companion because they must be paired with coffee
• cinnamon-filled because the swirls are lined with cinnamon
• yeast-risen because the yeast makes them grow plump and plumper

As I studied these words and played with them–positioning them on the six lines, I noticed I had three adjectives: yeast-risen, honey-glazed, cinnamon-filled, and three nouns: coffee-companion, morning-dream, favored-breakfast.

Did you notice that the adjectives are “noun-verb” in form, e.g., honey-glazed? The nouns are ingredients of sticky buns. The verbs (participles because they are working as adjectives) will subtly add action to my poem.

The hyphenated nouns are kennings, forming metaphors — a perfect element for poetry.

I thought about order and decided to put the descriptive words first, so I placed the adjectives on lines 3-5. I organized these by the baking process: putting cinnamon on the dough before rolling up, allow yeast to rise after the dough has been sliced into spiral buns, and finally, adding the glaze to sticky buns fresh from the oven, still warm.

I placed the kennings (metaphorical compound nouns) on lines 7-9. Once the sticky buns were baked, we could think of cool names we might give them. I ordered the kennings by time, from waking to eating.

Sticky Bun
Your sweetness wafting through my kitchen
sticky bun
cinnamon-filled
yeast-risen
honey-glazed
sticky bun
morning-dream
favored-breakfast
coffee-companion
sticky bun
wafting your sweetness through my kitchen

© 2019 Alice Nine

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