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The
Butcher's Wife
The
year was round with zeros, 1900,
and they lived in a Lithuanian shtetl
where her garden smelled like roses and mint
and she collected eggs each day
from fifteen chickens
to sell at the market stand.
Her husband was a butcher,
a moyl really, but who could make a living
doing circumcisions?
He had a shop and knives, lots of knives.
A peddler came to the farm one day
and showed her how to open her mouth
and kiss. When he left,
she ran her tongue along the surface
of her teeth and smiled.
It took three days to spill her confession.
Why else would a peddler spend
a sunny afternoon at one farm?
So she fasted, a full week,
as her husband ordered,
and scrubbed her mouth with soap.
She had no words that week.
Nothing passed between her lips.
But when she stepped into her garden
her whole mouth blossomed
roses, the taste of mint.
published
in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal (2007)
also in The Torah: A Women's Commentary (2007).
At
the Window
for my mother
June arrives with morning fog
stuck on the windshield. I unlatch
the trunk and set my mother’s walker on the curb.
We love Ventura’s downtown boutiques,
but the breeze bites today
and her back won’t stand the stroll.
So we turn into the deli for soup
and for a moment I’m ten,
back on Faversham Road with beef stew brewing
in the kitchen, my mother squishing
raw hamburger and garlic with her fists.
Monday nights I stood crying
at the green bay window, steaming the pane
with breath, writing my initials, while my mother
climbed into a brick-red Buick
with the girls. Once she looked up
before getting in the car, then came inside
and took my hand. When I drove off
to San Francisco at twenty-one, I left her
sobbing at that same green window.
The soup is just half gone,
but my mother takes my arm
and moves to her walker. Tomorrow
she will straighten at the airport reaching
for a kiss, and I will lean against tinted windows,
as the plane lifts up, watching for her.
published in Solo Cafe (2008)
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