Erika Meitner

Memory is flotsam (yes) just below the surface an eternal city a heap of rubble debris smaller than your fist an animal with- out a leash organized wreck- age ghost net or one hanging silence on the phone— she's gone, my sister said, and we wept and wept over my grandmother while my sister sat with her body and me in the static and the rabbi they sent told her to recite psalms as comfort so we listened to each other breathe instead and my sister's breath was a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted Chinese jump-rope         her breath was the coiled terrycloth turban our grandmother wore when she cooked or walked the shallow end of her condo pool for exercise— our grandmother still somewhere in her white turban sewing Cornish game hens together with needle and string or somewhere in her good wig playing poker or somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN while cookies shaped like our initials bake in her oven O memory how much you erased how many holes         we punched in your facts since who knows the stories she never told about the camps there are no marked graves just too much food on holidays diabetes my mother's fear of ships and the motion of some suspension bridges O memory you've left us trauma below the surface and some above like the fact that I can't shake the December my sister's red hair caught fire from leaning too close to the menorah's candles, our grandmother putting her out with a dish towel with her strong arms.

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym. Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot. He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery, Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead. We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead. The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial— gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse:Pour out Thy wrath upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob. May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found! My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic. Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy. My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners, says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places? My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider, sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral, her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like that they don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker— my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms.Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben. Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was.Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived.Der vind voyet. The wind howls, says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember, but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?

The poem in which we drive an hour to the beach and Uncle Dave doesn't get out of his lawn chair once. The poem in which we left the yellow plastic shovel behind and everyone is bereft. The poem in which I can't stop talking about how you walked deep into Lake Erie and the water was still only up to your knees when you turned into a speck past the rock jetty. The poem in which everyone listens to celebrity gossip in the car on the way back. The poem in which I pontificate on how ugly the fiancée of that Jonas brother is, and how they're too young to get married, and how my grandmother's old neighbor would have said, "Ugly? She can't help that she's ugly. It's that she's so stupid," and I would have yelled at her for assuming that all former hair- dressers are dim. The poem in which I turn into my grandmother's old neighbor. The poem in which I remember very clearly how they both stored tissues in their bras. The poem in which I think about how this would horrify your mother—the pendulous breasts, the moist tissues, the dipping into the cleavage to retrieve anything. The poem in which your mother tries not to wince when I order whatever I want from the menu despite her coupon for two medium 1-topping pizzas. The poem in which I try to find a deeper meaning for why I notice the woman ahead of us in line at Johnny's Liquor Store who buys a pack of menthols and asks the guy behind the counter if he knows her good-for-nothing brother. She has hair that looks like cats got at a skein of yarn, and a tattoo above her ankle that's dark and unspecified. It's far enough above her ankle that it's nearly mid- calf—like her ankle and calf are two different countries and the tattoo got lost in the borderlands on the way to its actual destination. The poem in which I am territory that is under dispute and no one will occupy it because of fear and uncertainty. The poem in which I reach the conclusion that this feeling is inspired by your mother and the way she hums out-of-season carols while doing kitchen tasks, though it's not really about the humming but rather the time she asked me to light the Hanukkah candles in the attic because it would be better if they were out of the way for the Christmas party. The poem in which you and I are in line waiting to buy a mixed six-pack of Great Lakes and I am staring at a stranger's tattoo and thinking about the fact that I am not Anne Frank while the baby is in the car with your mother. The poem in which I go into Walmart and buy the baby an olive-green cap that looks suspiciously like Fidel Castro's. The poem in which I could eradicate the fact that I ever went into Walmart and bought anything so the baby can one day start a revolution. The poem in which we see a couple on the highway median in a stalled-out Buick and don't stop to help. The poem in which the highway median looks like the spit of land between two enemy trenches and I feel a deep longing for my childhood. The poem in which I remember, for no apparent reason, the tornado instructions taped to the sides of all the filing cabinets in one office I worked in that was on the top floor of a mostly abandoned mall in Overland Park, Kansas. All that was left: decorative fountains, floor tiles, mirrored ceilings, Nearly Famous Pizza, the carcass of Sears. The poem in which we leave Northeastern Ohio, The poem in which we return to Northeastern Ohio. The poem in which it is night and we are lost in Northeastern Ohio and we keep passing Amish buggies adorned with reflective tape. The poem in which the moon is a vehicle for content, and is far less than a perfect reflector of anything. The poem in which we are all in some kind of limbo.

It seems a certain fear underlies everything. If I were to tell you something profound it would be useless, as every single thing I know is not timeless. I am particularly risk-averse. I choose someone else over me every time, as I'm sure they'll finish the task at hand, which is to say that whatever is in front of us will get done if I'm not in charge of it. There is a limit to the number of times I can practice every single kind of mortification (of the flesh?). I can turn toward you and say yes, it was you in the poem