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Selected
poems from Potato
Eaters by
Amy Nawrocki
Van
Gogh’s Ear
The
scar on her throat, hole in her stomach,
are
birthmarks of a different kind,
changing
her from an original form.
She
was not born to feel moldy
as
a wet swimsuit left too long
in
a zip-lock bag, not born to vomit
on
the floor or sleep in the foyer of chaos,
where
the fever coats her in thick paint.
She
turns inward and thinks of van Gogh,
his
ear, and those prehistoric sunflowers.
The
fact that she sees a self-portrait
with
a bandaged ear and feels nothing
but
envy, recognition, and luck
gives
her reasons to fight.
She
starts to listen to the inertia
of
her body, and finds out a war occurs
in
every action of the mitochondria;
every
time a cell fights for the perfect ratio,
water
to air, food to energy, it tells her
that
something is lost between her veins
and
the pastel capillaries of Amsterdam.
So
she learns survival, since we are not born
for
this complicated kind of painting,
but
the more primitive sort,
one
that smells of coal mines and dirt,
one
that tastes sadness with potato eaters,
one
that frees the brain from feverish paint.
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Babka
I
eat the bread with raisins and some butter,
remembering how I
first learned to knead it.
My mother’s hands would shape
the bread
in careful mounds, the counter floured
in a
dusting, light as graying memory.
I mix the dough with raisins
and some sugar
moving the moist glob with my hands.
She’d
warn me not to knead too gently,
her hands would show me how
the bread
should give and tug, like elastic,
then
surrender; let the yeast begin
to tease the bread with flavor
and some nurture.
As we stand in the kitchen, light
streaming in,
the heat takes over with deft precision;
my
mother’s hands would ease the bread
into awaited
sleep. She tells me now
to let it sit, give it time, watch it
rise.
I eat the bread with raisins and some butter.
I long
to see her hands rising in my own.
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Spook
the Moon
When
she gives him the airline ticket
for
Christmas, he takes it, and lands
at
the terminal without a companion;
a
loose tooth on top of it all. A woman
in
a shady dress opens the bar door,
making
the light swirl up in strings
and
revolve around the room to match
the
nucleus of his mood. The book he reads
was
exhausted two hours after malted
whiskey
finally gave him glimpses
of
the shifting twilight he will miss
along
the route to a strange world. Distance
can
be measured only by dark shivers,
the
kind that sweep down the spine
if
given the chance. Before the last flight
he
asks for the bill and discovers
how
far away from his life he really is.
As
night willows in and out of alleyways,
he
removes gloves from his pockets,
coughs,
and walks from the shuttle stop
to
Boyle Street where he lives. It’s easy
to
leave the thick molasses air of the bar,
to
be lonely tonight with his wife
and
television. The toothache and the knot
in
his stomach mimic a feeling of regret
because
this is not his life. The wind
has
burrowed into the cuffs of his shirt,
burned
his skin, and cut the night off
permanently.
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