Helen in bed
asleep again, or
never sleeping. The old field
is hanging from the ceiling. The room
topples over and she
is alone in the pasture,
on her Papa’s farm. In Romania, she
is 13 again, her sister Ana is 16.
Helen won’t meet Franz
for another 9 years. She’ll fall in love
twice, lose a fiancé,
her firstborn, her sister,
her home country. But in the field
on the ceiling, she knows
none of these things.
*
Helen watching tv.
Jeopardy first, then Wheel.
Franz asleep. The kinder
on the floor, twisting their
tiny bodies in formations
like those left behind on the side
of unpaved roads between
Budapest and Vienna.
*
Helen in the kitchen.
Cooking schnitzel.
The meat hums in the skillet
while her son-in-law
calls Franz Frank and she sees
a boy in the 70s, pulling up
on his motorbike, hair
dangling over his neck.
He smells foreign.
Why is he wearing a suit now? Helen!
The schnitzel is burning and
this man rushes into the smoke
and Helen can’t take her eyes off
his tie.
*
Helen waiting
for Franz to return
from church, from work in Oxnard,
from Austria. Helen remembers
waiting. Abwarten wird nicht
einfacher – she never
thinks in English. She never
dreams in English. The kinder
scream in the yard.
The ball went over the fence
again. Her old tongue,
the language of her dreams,
her fields,
means nothing to them.
*
Helen in the ER.
Doctors speak
so quickly. Never directly
to her. Words she doesn’t understand
pierce holes in her consciousness
until she loses hold of her youngest
daughter’s hand and finds herself
riding in the passenger seat
in a Volkswagon through Heidelberg.
Franz smiles the way
he never does in America.
She winces involuntarily while
hands burrow through her stomach.
She imagines her son’s birth,
his death, the same day.
She blinks and his face is
one of the grandkids and
she’s ashamed. She can’t tell
the difference between them
when they’re still blonde.
On the phone they all
have the same voice.
*
Helen in back of the buggy.
She is 17 and she’s worn
the same clothes for weeks.
Twenty days since her sister
stayed behind. An airplane warns
the whole family to hide on
the side of the road. She stares up
at palm trees lining Ventura Blvd
in California, some sixty years later.
She’s losing Ana’s face. But she remembers
the Romani girls they met on the road.
She looks backwards, or maybe
they’re still up ahead.
spoke about the letters
under her bed. Letters
from the old country. Envelopes stiff
from some ancient dampness, forty years
of forgetting. Letters from Sorina.
Her handwriting crooked
across the pages, reeking of a violence
Oma doesn’t understand.
How could she respond
to stories that don’t make sense
in the new world? They drink
no water, no wine or schnapps,
only blood! Young men
writhing on the floor, firing
imaginary machine guns,
color escaping their
bodies as they howl.
Oma’s silver tooth gleams
when she half smiles at the mention
of Transylvania. She knows tonight
she’ll dream of a red man on a red horse,
a red bird in his hand and
a red dog on his side.
–Art by Petra
–Art by NiiCoLaZz
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