For H.
The house was brick and square,
just like the houses on either side,
each kitchen window looking into
each kitchen window.
The house made smaller by
the massive furniture transported
from another time and place.
Dark, hand-carved woods—
the colossal china cabinet encroaching
into the living room.
The dining room table spanning
almost wall-to-wall.
The sideboard of souvenirs—
his long absences to undisclosed locales
reduced to figurines and painted fans.
Sometimes,
she seemed just as surprised
as the furniture to be there.
Rolling out phyllo dough
while the city buses rumbled by,
all six feet of her bent over the table,
the pin dwarfed by her massive,
long-fingered hands,
hands made to span the strings of a lyre or
grip the reins of a chariot.
When she cooked,
I’d come up from the
windowless, low-ceilinged basement,
where we both pretended I was studying
with the eldest son,
and offer to help.
Not because I could do much, but
because it pleased her to show me how.
And it pleased me to please her.
I would squeeze the lemons for the avgolemo,
stir in the ribbon of egg.
Every few months,
she would muscle the couch to a different wall,
push the chairs to a new angle,
rearrange the lamps, the coffee table, the sideboard,
the end tables, the ottomans, the pipe stand,
the hall tree, the magazine rack,
searching for some overlooked crevice of space
to stretch and breathe in,
some hidden door out of this mansion of secrets.
Laura Schulkind, an attorney by day, is entrusted with others’ stories. Through poetry she tells her own. She has two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press: Long Arc of Grief (2019) and Lost in Tall Grass (2014). Her work also appears in numerous journals and on her website, www.lauraschulkind.com.