SECRETS OF ASSIMILATION
I never saw it coming—
her hair hidden
in crushed white
tissue paper, once lining
an old gift box, wrapped
in a plastic bag,
once used for holding
apples or plums:
a long single braid,
knotted on both sides
to stop the fraying, the undoing,
sixty-five years nested under stockings
in the top drawer of her bureau
discovered after she died,
cut at sixteen, four years after she left
her shtetl in Poland for Ellis Island,
alone in steerage, having said goodbye
to her parents forever.
Secrets of assimilation,
new immigrant wanting
to look American, fit in,
no more Yiddish locks or curls
that once remembered her mother
washing with kerosene,
picking out the lice,
cracking them between her fingertips,
sharing an outhouse
with five hundred villagers,
poverty never preventing
her from eating challah
with her family fresh from
the oven each Sabbath,
pressing the churned butter,
made from the cows of her father,
firmly onto the slice, attempting
to make one thing stick forever.
Meghan Adler’s poems have been published in Alimentum, Gastronomica, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The North American Review. Her fist book of poetry, Pomegranate is now out with Main Street Rag.