One Hundred and One Years

It seems a former lifetime—
those two-day Passovers
in the Bronx, standing
in the little room above Tibbett Ave

fingering the dust on glass
flowers as I felt the migrations
of multitudes. My mother said
all of New York was en route

as if in the jointures of bones
where I held breath I could feel
the compression of beams
on the old George Washington

Bridge, the cacophony
of horns over the water, the stop-
lights of Manhattan and in the corner
of my mind. I slept

in the living room, on springs
that prodded. In the middle
of the night tiny lights
illuminated small cages

of darkness. Grandma,
living alone without loneliness,
lips hooked around her gums
as if nursing an ancient bitterness.

Once you called me “spoiled.”
I responded with silence
as if it could be heard
over other silences.
The sound of your sister breathing
like an angel saying goodbye
on your last night together.

To get past immigration,
you gave a piece of your eye,
a layer of sclera so fine
it stole no sight from the grey
cloudy harbors of your eyes.

And since coming to the Bronx,
you collected shoes,
stacked them on the closet door.
My cousin and I stuck our hands in them
as if they were puppets,
feeling their loose, ragged tongues,
shaggy buckles, battered soles.

We ran up to the second balcony
of Bella’s old apartment
and looked down at the cracked
grass-dappled yard below,
as if there were no higher point
from which to stand,
no more precarious ledge
from which to fall.

When you died, a stranger
asked me what you loved.
And I couldn’t think of anything
except that you loved Passover.
As a girl, in a place razed
out of time, you thrilled
at opening a sacred chest
to lay the special plates.

________

Aviva Kasowski’s work has appeared in Ninth Letter web edition, The Bellingham Review, South Carolina Review, Spillway, and others.  She is a former Bread Loaf work-study scholar and was a poetry resident at Art Farm, Nebraska.  She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and is completing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at The University of Georgia in Athens.  She enjoys hanging out upside down on aerial silks and looks forward to practicing again with her community.