In the two-story end-of-the-row apartment,
train tracks running through the backyard
like zucchini through a garden,
fat old Józef reads the Bible in Polish.
His wife Irenka paces the rows of cucumbers,
drifting back to Poland where in her girlhood
she loved to lay on the grass clippings
of her newly mown lawn, allowed to sleep there
on the hottest nights, stretched on a thin blanket,
a picnic for the mosquitoes.
Their American son Joe parks his hog
outside the listing barn he’s made into a gym
where the neighborhood machos
lift weights and banter every afternoon.
In Kraków, Irenka cut paper till it looked like lace,
making scenes out of what was left behind.
Though her hands have toughened on prickly vines,
her fingers are still nimble enough to place,
one by one, white scalloped shells
at the feet of the virgin in her concrete hollow.
From the barn, the sound of grunts and metal
on metal, the counting out of repetitions,
and through comes the four o’clock freight
with its cylindrical cars full of resources.
As it passes, Irenka stands again on a platform
at seventeen, a suitcase held with a belt at her side,
Józef at the ticket counter, purchasing escape,
leaving Irenka-and-Józef-shaped holes.
—————
Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her books include a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her online at rebeccahartolander.com or @rholanderpoet.