UMLÄUT 2020 - THE PANDEMIC ISSUE
CREATE
Tess Horton
Kohlrouladen
On my way home from Hebrew school a few nights ago, I walked past a group of elderly women sleeping on the concrete seating arrangement in front of the beach. Although I didn’t look at them for long, they were slumped forwards like the sacks of wheat flour lining the pantry back at home, with their sun hats pulled low over their faces and their brittle hands resting on their skirted laps. I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or if they were dead. I thought to myself, isn’t that strange? They might have been, for all I knew, but I kept on walking. I didn’t want to deal with five dead bodies, anyway. My mother had prepared kohlrouladen and I could smell it, drafting through the tilted venetian blinds above the kitchen window. I was still three blocks away but I could smell it and I couldn’t care less about the dead. Maybe I never have—when my grandfather died, for example, I’ll talk about that: I showed up at his house, I could feel the green tea sloshing in my stomach, hot and undigested, and he was dead on the floor. I looked at him and I knew. He was the same color as the camellia on my tongue and the dirt between my toes. I didn’t say anything and maybe that was my mistake, because when my mother dropped the bag of plastic groceries behind me and pushed me out of the way, I turned back to the stairs and sat in the car while she cried inside, alone. She doesn’t talk about her dad and I don’t talk about mine. Her dad is dead and mine isn’t. She fucked my dad and I didn’t fuck hers. That’s the difference. Her dad is dead and mine isn’t. Her dad is dead like the elderly sleeping on the sun-heated, burned-up concrete couches in front of a salt-stricken sea, and my dad isn’t. Her dad’s dead. My dad isn’t.
Anna Goodman
Dear Anna Goodman,
Has your skin finally turned blue?
Last I checked you were cream still—
and I was kicking the moon like Gouda
and I was humming a tune like eau de Nil
Sometimes I think about the kiss-after-soup we shared in the dark of the kitchen
I think about the oil on your tongue and the rhubarb tang that filled us stupid
I think about the eggshell lamp above us and the fish in my stomach, dead
Dear Anna Goodman,
Have you figured out the bliss?
How the Hagia Sophia swelled round—
and I was preaching at a Synagogue
and I was combing my golden dog bald
Sometimes I think about brittle ginger cookies as we stacked them in the January rain
I think about the waft of death from my Mutti’s breath when she ate her peanut spoon
I think about the quilt on my bed with the splitting seams on the squares with half moons
Dear Anna Goodman,
Did you want to breathe it too?
The aching mountain air past ten—
and I was running along the lipway
and I was singing a deaf-man’s ode to you
Sometimes I think about that withered man you’d croon to on your harp,
I think about the way he’d spit as he sat with you in the mildew-darkened room
I think about the meat in his stomach and the heat in your sweetened palms, wet and new
Dear Anna Goodman,
When you died, did you feel it good?
Did the death you felt bring silk gloves too
Or did you die with hands bare and nude?
Sometimes I think about waitress hips as they sway to serve me gold
Sometimes I think about the way you slept as you sunk in that urban lagoon
I think of the man on the shore and I, as we watched you lick the bottom of the moon