Eric Odynocki
Dear
1
Point me in the right direction
my thumbprints hopscotch QWERTY.
Though the Great Recession plonked me
an hour and a half away from home
and family, a text dissolves the bridges
and tolls and bumper-to-bumper. Mom,
brother, and sisters chime in my
kitchen. Their presence a scroll
of speech bubbles that unspools
without end. A digital codex. Relic.
On an old cell phone in a drawer
I have dad’s last text.
2
A flood in my mom’s basement and I am home,
moving and drying boxes. We find a pile of letters
dad saved, letters from dziadek and babcia,
letters from their kitchen table behind the Wall,
all dated from before I was born. ‘81, ‘83, ‘84.
Years of rations, protests. Teargas and batons.
Flimsy paper covered edge to edge
in swirls, loops, and sharp peaks in once blue ink
now turned purple. A pair of handwriting
on the same sheet, his letter on top
and hers immediately after—a near palimpsest—
meant paper was precious, a postage stamp
a luxury. I puzzle what I can: here, dziadek
wants to know more about dad’s lab; he sends
mom regards with three exclamation points
as if he never told her she came out of a teepee;
babcia scolds dad to write more often; how proud
she is my older brother, a toddler then, understands
Spanish and Polish; her sign-off, always, mama.
Dad used to say we would get along, loomed
her legend throughout my childhood. Open-
minded. Married out of faith. A bookworm.
A polyglot. We stew her recipe every New Year’s:
latkes, onion, chicken parts steaming
in thick broth speckled in golden rings of oil.
I never met babcia. She passed when I was two.
Before I fold the yellowed papers to fit them
back into their light blue envelopes,
I trace the creases, think how they form
a compass, put there by her hands.
Ineffable
1On holidays, I make sure
to get to the cemetery.
To visit dad. He rests
under a plaque that bears
his picture and unapologetically
Slavic name. I repeat it
so my niece knows
how to pronounce it.
From dad’s stories, I know
his mother’s name:
a hyphenated poem rooted
in words for weary and life.
She worked in a library
in their Silesian town,
dusted off the covers,
alphabetized the titles
in Polish, Russian, German,
Yiddish; turned piles
into a room of tidy alcoves.
She greeted patrons by name,
handed them books
they’d like before
they’d even ask. Until 1968
when scapegoating became
official policy again.
Years after the Wall fell,
I kneel by her grave
in the cmentarz komunalny.
The letters etched
on her tombstone do not
spell her birth name.
A decision set in marble
so her memorial
can remain standing
in the field of crosses.
2
Dad named me after his favorite
guitarist. My toddler black curls
inspired his nickname for me.
I did not always call him dad.
That was a preteen invention,
an absorption of cafeteria lingo,
assimilation’s notch on my tongue.
Before we taped the first poster
on our bedroom walls, my siblings
and I would hear the clock chime 7
and we’d revamp the foyer into
a jungle gym of hugs ringing
with our welcome committee’s name
for him: papi. A puff of mom’s culture.
A word that sounds like poppy.
Its black seeds swirl as the dense filling
of my favorite dessert, makowiec.
Dad would buy it in Riverhead.
He’d say, Pushkin, look what I got you.
Eric Odynocki is a first-generation American poet and fiction writer with Mexican, Ukrainian, and Ashkenazi roots. His work has appeared in Plume Poetry, Consequence, Newfound Journal, The Brooklyn Review, PANK, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. When not teaching high school Spanish or Italian, Eric is an MFA student at Stony Brook Southampton.