and the woman who sold them wore a thick sweater
buttoned in the middle of 90 degree heat.
But we didn’t notice, reaching for the salt shaker
on the counter then opening our mouths wide to the boiled
and baked dough, once a gold field of grain
now enclosing cream cheese pinked by lox.
We sucked the dough before it stuck
to the roof of the mouth,
then ran back on streets wide enough
to nourish birches planted before foundations
were metered and bricks laid.
The heat always stayed, metal to touch. The earth welcomed us
squawking raw and sweet
from finches overhead.
Our cousins said to us, You have no accent
at these Jersey reunions with great aunts and uncles
who left Poland and the Ukraine. Like Tessie
who in her Queens apartment stayed up until 3 a.m. baking rugelach
and in an upstate cabin each summer served us kasha varnishkas
loaded with butter. I knew her sisters sold
their wedding rings to bring her over.
Yet for us the war had been replaced by Hogan’s Heroes,
the same way a remnant onion
on a sesame bagel called
backwards, the same way we didn’t consider
the bagel woman
and how her accent
betrayed everything she escaped.
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Shore, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Salon.
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