i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always in bowls

folding, pinching, rolling the dough

making the bread

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always under water

sifting rice

bluing clothes

starching lives

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always in the earth

planting seeds

removing weeds

growing knives

burying sons

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always under

the cloth

pushing it along

helping it birth into

skirt

dress

curtains to lock out

night

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside

the hair

parting

plaiting

twisting it into rainbows

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside

pockets

holding the knots

counting the twisted veins

holding onto herself

let her hands disappear

into sky

i know the grandmother one had hands

but they were always inside the clouds

poking holes for

the rain to fall.

I wear my grandmother’s teeth on my wrist. She mostly  
used her teeth for smiling. Hi gang! Big and open, her whole 
arm scribing overhead in joy as we approached. Seems  
almost caricature, but it was real. She was real. I miss her. I don’t 

know how she stayed, after all her losses, so cheerful, alone.  
Decades alone, widowed young, alone by choice 
in her bed. The teeth I wear are not from her mouth, but  
from a jaw older maybe even than humans: walrus, fossilized, 

bought before I was born that time she and her husband 
flew a small plane they could borrow cheap, thanks to  
his job at Boeing—details, details, the small gold chain 
that double-checks the bracelet’s clasp, how much security

the details give us—to Alaska. My goodness, the romance,  
the time, their lucky, white, poor and upwardly mobile, just- 
post-depression, educated selves. Those teeth of hers  
I wear are not recently of ocean or ice, and absolutely not 

of this new ocean, this new thin ice, but dug from earth  
and browned by earth, the rest of their original life gone. The  
nerves and blood, the soft gums, the sensitive, broad 
mystacial pad and its seeking whiskers. My grandmother 

wasn’t like a fossil, which is what some people get called  
when they get old. In the care home where she lived  
for a few years or months (time blurs), they said her smile hid  
her decline. I think again about the pass politeness, rote

manners, can give—their grace or shroud. Inside my mouth,  
all my teeth sit still in their sockets, minus little bits which, in some  
cases, are filled with expensive compounds my grandmother’s 
daughter could afford and which I did not tend or value

enough when their care became mine. I know how loose  
teeth can be when a life hasn’t held them or when life’s flush  
fades, when the flesh sags off. I’ve found so many seal jaws,  
dolphin jaws, porpoise jaws on the beach, in dunes, and, 

whether I pocket anything or not, I always wiggle them  
in their ragged sockets, count the cusps, touch each point, which  
tells me not what they said but who, as a species, they were.  
Are.  Hi, gang!  So sweet, so eager to see even our shitty, selfish 

teenage selves. Inside my mouth, there’s a whole lot  
of impolite, but I know how to close my lips around it.  
The teeth on my wrist from my grandmother might  
be fragile. I don’t know and can’t unless I try to break 

them. She was such a joyous force. She was such a joyous  
force. It makes me afraid to pull the bracelet over the knob  
of my wrist, to stretch the old elastic, because I have lost  
so much joy already, which is entirely my fault. She seemed, 

to me, to always be vibrant with care. The teeth are loose  
on my wrist. Once, someone put her finger on the small  
spur no one notices below the last knuckle of my hand and  
that is why I bought a different bracelet that touches me 

where she touched me, with the same, delicate precision.  
I hardly ever wear the other bracelet, the teeth, which  
are really little squares, like lozenges to ease a throat, and 
haven’t I been sore-voiced?  Hey, gang!  Her arms waving

like she was guiding a plane to the gate. The way  
she would love whoever saw her. Really. Whoever.

^{translated from the Yiddish by Daniel Kraft}

Dear mother, dear mother, I saw you from afar today,
you stood with your siddur and prayed for all of us
across these distances, your prayer was borne across the seas,
and like Noah’s blue dove your prayer brought me a leaf …

I spread it on my heart and wrote my poem on it
of my solitude, of my sadness by dawn and night;
not much remains of my unlived life,
in the flood of people I am but a single tear …

I’d write and write, but probably you’d weep
if I told everything to you about my sorrow in these quiet nights.
Across the seas and distances, my poem comes to you.
It will kiss your old siddur, and weave itself into your prayer …

Ellis Island, November 1938
 

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

A walk       through a field     carrying               my mother’s wounds
The glorious                   gap                in my grandmother’s
teeth         The iron       swallowing
   the wrinkles        from my sister’s dress      My stubborn
         brothers    throw their heads back          in laughter
I marvel              the harvest                          of their uncombed
kinks     A phantom of a father                         the tremor of his
voice   My mother   silent exorcist    on a good day
The roaches praising                             the empty of the night
The oven open      it’s yawn devours    the brittle cold
Winter unyielding                    it wills             to break
My grandmother and her children   squatters in an    empty
brownstone      The passing down    of how to thaw   the absence
of money          We do not count   The lessons of       growing
up                    without
Instead—
My great-aunt remembers            her mother                a master of
bearing joy      While cleaning others’ homes     how ample humility
                   runs in the caretaker
When she is forced     to forget everything        I watch her in a
facility    The quiet blink of her eyes                 a drowning past
         she’s unable to tell me                             When she dies
I visit her home     the land     expands              a restless     root
She is buried      next to her husband
Who is buried     next to her daughter
Who is buried     next to her son
Who is not buried  next to his nephew      who dies
Many years later                 in utter silence          a memory
revives     an ancestor                                             Who unearths
          itself to marvel      the vast            and fertile    infinite