Borscht

The recipe calls for a pot that

hasn’t been used since before the war.

Stir the beets with a wooden spoon,

watch the pink rise like old blood.

I buy a fistful of parsley at the market,

it wilts by the time I remember

it was for the soup. My bunică would sing

doine to God like he was a child on the counter

waiting to be fed. She taught me how to

peel potato skin in snake-shed coils and

gouge out the eyes. I cut myself.

The potato slips, slick with red inheritance.

If you look through the window, you’ll see her

squatting in the garden, callouses pinching

mazăre and fasole off their hairy stalks.

Bunică grew her own peppers for zacuscă

and leuștean for bad dreams. When I’d

sprain my ankle, she’d wrap it in cabbage.

When I’d burn my wrist, she’d

smear it with honey. She always had a jar

of pickles with garlic and dill floating

in slow-motion, like spores in tongues of light.

She knew the fleshy folds of the land in Bucovina

like it was one of the children she’d made

in her body. She drank bone broth from the belly

of clay, scooped sana out of red-throated jugs

with wooden spoons. There was no plastic.

Everything in the kitchen had earth in it.

The apron around my waist, she used to wear

as if wrapping God around her like a mink coat.

Near the hem, an old stain bloomed in brown blotches,

the dried blood of a younger summer’s strawberry.

After three hours, I ladle out the last

of the root-heart, translucent pink skin

stuck slick against the spoon. The beets

have turned my nail beds violet.