Barbara Krasner

Kintsugi
 
If only I could fill the chasms of my life with silver or gold. The open veins caused by lack of companionship, the silences of no one to listen. If only I could mortar the space between tesserae with granddaughter giggles and hugs around the neck. If only I could batten the noise with the softness of stuffed animals and the ankle socks my mother used to fill with kosher salt to cure an earache. If only I could breathe deeply with Vicks VapoRub® to unlock my nasal passages and feel the mentholated heat on my chest. If only I could pour my mother’s chicken soup with mashed up matzoh balls into the skeins of my memory, loosen the phlegm in my throat when I cry out for her, seventeen years after her death. If only I could back out of the garage without hitting the goddamn plastic garbage can and without taking out half the weather-stripping of the door frame. If only I could make myself whole once again, stitch together that skin that’s eating me alive since the Moderna booster fool’s gold. 

**

The Memory Collectors 

I save my father. His voice mail words before his 1997 death, “This is your father.” 
 
Like my father, I collected stamps: He gave me a U.S. stamp album. I insisted on a Poland album, too, because my mother’s parents came from there. I sat down at vendor tables at stamp shows in Atlantic City, Manhattan, and upstate New York with money my father gave me, trying to fill the gaps on album pages. I learned names of colours like vermilion, ultramarine, and carmine and names of philately tools like glassine envelopes, adhesive hinges, and tongs. I gathered free stock books at my father’s instruction. I paged through the Stamp News and watched my father ink his Emkay Stamp Service rubber stamp onto glue-white envelopes holding his many inquiries.
 
Like my father, I collected books. His metal-framed racks and wooden tables bursting with volumes about wine, publishing, and media moguls. My shelves exploding about the Holocaust and shtetl and immigrant life. In the city, we haunted the stacks of The Strand on Broadway. We came home, emptied our bags on the dining room table, picked a book each and started reading over Burger King salads in the kitchen. We didn’t say a word.  
 
I stockpile my father’s memorabilia: I cleared out his basement desk after his death, tucking away his folders in my bag before my sisters noticed anything. His hidden treasures became mine. His 1937 Chrysalis high school yearbook, his senior portrait of slick-backed hair with the nickname “Moxie,” and the caption, “He’ll find a way or make it,” as a member of North Arlington High School’s first graduating class. His high school ring. The aerial photographs he took in the Army Air Force while stationed outside London in Nuthampstead, G-d’s canvas of B-17 Flying Fortresses, his World War II prayer book for those of the Jewish faith. His 1946 address book, a shared asset with his new bride, my mother. His father’s knotted silk sock preserving a laminated pin of my grandfather’s deceased sister, Malka. 
 
Still, I curate my own collection: Snippets of his handwriting scratched on notepad scraps, the phone number of his personal buyer at The Strand, the phone number of the Fallsview Hotel in the Catskills. I stash the artifacts in a basket-weave trunk at the foot of my bed, keeping them safe for the next generation. 

**
 
Shock
 
Shock is when your sister calls and says her husband, 56, died of a heart attack while eating salad at Applebee’s. Shock is the look on the soon-to-be ex-husband’s face when you tell him you’re filing for divorce. Shock is the set of financial demands he makes of you, because it’s always been about the money for him. Shock sings. Shock stings. Shock is what you wish the medical team had applied to get your father’s shunted heart pumping again. Shock is seeing a photo of your Methuselah grandfather with actual hair and learning your great-grandparents had immigrated to America and lived in Newark’s Third Ward. Shock is when you find out all the irreplaceable photos from the Old Country were ruined and tossed away when the boiler burst. Shock wails. Shock mourns. Shock is what you go into when a Chevy Equinox rear-ends your beloved Infiniti on the parkway, shattering all windows and deploying three airbags. Shock is the litmus test to assure you you’re still alive.
 
 **

Alphabet Vulgaris
 
The outline of a pemphigus vulgaris lesion, the white crust a picture frame of inherited disease sits on my computer. I stare at it, this tiny container reminding me of maybe centuries of pain and stain. I call it the P-stain. Just one of many autoimmune manifestations in the family like alopecia and psoriasis and, of course, the Big D, diabetes.
 
A tiny universe sits within the crusted legion, Russian leather boots or maybe Polish depending on the year, or maybe Austrian or Austro-Hungarian, Polish before or after, also depending on the year.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the S-curves along imagined Ukrainian roads where my grandmother’s grandmother fell off of a bridge in May 1890 into the Vysushka or the Tsutsirka River and died. It was Austria then. I suppose there was no room to make a K-turn in a wooden wagon on a narrow wooden bridge. I was never good at K-turns. I could refer to the S-curve, because my grandmother’s grandparents bore the name Seife, or soap. Soap, that slithery, slippery stuff, might have caused the horses to slide.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the Big D, rock candy crystals so enormous that pockmark my legs like misshaped stacks of harvested wheat in the breadbasket that is Ukraine, where my grandmother’s shtetl has planted itself since 1939.
 
But what I’m looking for is a U-turn, a way back to mobility without walker or cane, a return to normalcy, to not having to strategize how to pull my legs onto the bed or how to position my swollen foot on the stair to pull myself up with two hands. U-turns don’t exist. You can never go back the way you came even when following the same road. Atoms move on their own accord. They cannot be harvested or unleashed. They like to bang into each other and make new creations. You are one of them. 

**

Perseus in the Fourth Grade
 
How hard could it be to lop off the Gorgon’s head, with a snip here, well, all right, a massive incision across the neck, against the jugular, and all would be well with the world, such is the head of an old witch whose thoughts writhe with snakes getting all up into each other, biting each other with those rabid fangs, and as the boy sits in history class and watches that old nasty he’s come to hate, that old woman who scratches red ink to blot out his best work, that old woman who is older than Zeus himself, well, her head’s got to go, metaphorically speaking, and so the boy thinks if only he had Athena’s gifts of the golden shield and the invisibility helmet, he could rid his fourth-grade classroom of Medusa, but though she’s got eyes in the back of her head, she’s known to use the cabinet windows to reflect who is throwing spitballs, but if the boy had a magic shield he could avoid her failing him, that is, turning all his hard work into stone, if he could wear the helmet and sneak up on her, if he could just raise the shield and prevent that awful stare of hers that makes him and his classmates freeze on the spot, well, that and her constant threat to chain them to rock, watch them wriggle as they await the wrath  of Principal Kraken, and if the boy could use the shield and the helmet, maybe he’d get to feed Pegasus and fly that winged horse above the raging sea to his wildest dreams.

**

Blades of Memory Grass
 
after Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948
 
I sit in the kitchen after staging’s complete, the house ready for sale. The walls scream for me to hold onto them. The wall phone where my father taped photos of my mother’s hands, rings in my ears. The stovetop diagrams erased by decades of Brillo call for me to ignite the burners. The textured tile floor no longer awaits bare feet and cartwheels. The staging people ripped up the navy carpeting in the dining room revealing a century-old hardwood floor. But frame shadows on tufted wallpaper suggest abandoned wedding photos except for mine, which was banished to the basement. Inside yet outside, yearning for a place I can’t have. I remember the day in 1965 I wear ankle socks with new black patent leather shoes from Levy’s, run down the front brick stairs to show our neighbor across the street. I trip, and my sister holds my head in her lap while the doctor stitches my knee. Another day, 1968: I lie on the front lawn after running through the sprinkler, contemplating my future as cloud shapes suggest. My body crunches the plastic-like grass and I pull at milkweed and dandelions. I find a buttercup and place it under my chin. I cannot see its reflection. 

**

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and short fiction writer, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018), Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Caesura, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.