from FROM MALLS AND MUSEUMS
Discovering Hungarian at West End Mall
1.
Up Radnoti Miklos utca,
street named after the Hungarian poet
who died in labor camps months before liberation
in a city that volunteered Jews to Nazi death
ancestral home to parents who squeezed their way
past two World Wars to meet in New York City's immigrant hot-house.
I am looking to answer a question I have carried in a stone sack
within me for years, ransack a pastry shop and allow
poppy seeds, sugar, and lemon peel to fill my mouth, and like a moth
drawn to the lightest of things, move toward West End Mall's three floors
of stores, sit next to a statuesque ice-cream cone adorned with a red cherry
finish pastries and watch men and women belong to each other as I
try to break the code of this strange language
whispered in my infant ears.
2.
Near the Chain Link Bridge
I wear a badge of pure white,
a strand that expanded to a tell-tale swatch,
my grandmother Lenke's mark on me,
not the yellow star pinned to a sleeve.
She did not have to wear that, entered Ellis Island
pregnant with my Aunt Clara, bastard child
who revealed the secret on her death bed,
how Lenke was stranded alone
banned to the United States
to give birth to a baby, her sister's bindle
tucked inside a sewing machine.
Lenke's parents saved three lives, but not their own.
They say by the time she reached 30
her hair gleamed as white as enamel,
and when she baked, she set out her cakes
with cloth and napkins.
I looked for her, my namesake,
my missing chain link
suspended over the Danube
running down my spine
and when the pot-bellied waiter
came to my side and winked twice,
my mouth opened in Hungarian,
and he knew what I wanted.
