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Anne
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Anne

by
May 10, 2023
The Basket of Bread
The Basket of Bread, Salvador Dalí, 1926

Melissa Strilecki has also been published in Sugar House Review,…

Your board and pin as ancient as you were, we set to work on the dumplings and with each pass of the dough ticked back to barrels of fermenting cabbage—kapusta, even after all those years, all the other words given way to English. Back to bags of flour angry with weevils, jars of pickling vegetables in the root cellar—just a hole in the frozen ground—for all those ungrowable months on the Canadian plains, not like the old country—which you never saw. Its flag: a blue sky atop a field of golden wheat. How many times did I hear the breadbasket of Europe? After a couple rounds with the dough, we were rolling in not farther but deeper. You walked miles in high heels to dances in churches, pews pushed to the walls. In your seventh decade, friends and widowers still talked up your legs. I never asked who you danced with, or why. The youngest of twelve, you left the farm, went down to Detroit on your own. Turning over ration coupons to the boarding houses where you worked, slept, and ate. I never asked you how you met your husband. He died on the table in ‘71 but was marked years before that, after his fall. Seven stories, trains of human chattel, buckets of cold water overnight. You once beat him off with a rolling pin, the one in your hand. Is that true or another lie? I tell people you were crazy but maybe you were just mean. I make lists on halved scraps of paper, folded and wet between my lips to make the freehand tear, or the back of a used envelope, and with closed eyes remember your deeply slanted cursive—its hooks and its swoops. I write out longhand the groceries, the errands, and invite you in and sit in that discomfort, and maybe—love? Your name recycled from an infant dead before you were born, you asked your mother: What would you have named me if she didn’t die? What is my real name? Half a century later, you would stand in your kitchen and ask me in the same tremulous voice.
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Melissa Strilecki has also been published in Sugar House Review, Rogue Agent, The Shore, Faultline, Volume Poetry, Gordon Square Review and Variant Literature, a publication for which she recently became a reader. Melissa lives in Seattle with her two children. On Twitter and Instagram, except for weeks she abandons social media in despair, @meliski81

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