Peeling Potatoes for Thanksgiving Dinner
The mud and the juice under your fingernails, sliding down your forearms. The quarter-sized slivers of skin filling the trash can, errant flicks of the wrist littering the floor. Every Thanksgiving of my life in this act - the wet legume in one hand, sometimes slipping free like a bar of soap; the repetitive flick of the other hand, the peeler slicing the tips of your fingers so that your flesh and the potato’s flesh become one in the bottom of the trash bag. The blood and the milky water and the mud streaming down the tendons of your wrist. My grandparent’s kitchen in Wisconsin. My childhood kitchen - vomit yellow linoleum, the sugar maple in the backyard clinging to its last bloody leaves - in Valparaiso. Our beige yellow, dormant yard in Media, football on in the other room. My brother and sister and I, even on those worst years, sitting together peeling potatoes. The act of revealing flesh beneath flesh. Cutting out the bruises and wounds. Rinsing out our sliced fingers in the sink.
Is there a more richly symbolic act? Summers in the Midwest spent sitting beneath immense cloudless skies, shucking corn into wheelbarrows. Long boozy nights south of New Orleans sitting around vats of steaming shrimp and crawfish, the high tower of translucent exoskeletons, the murk and muck worked deep under your fingernails. In New England, summer days and seashores, white paper bibs and butter like liquid gold. The fracture and crack of lobster shells. Brothers in El Salvador peel oranges, knives flashing live sculptor’s chisels, mosquitoes caught in their sticky fingers. The slowest buys the next round of beer. Uncovered women sitting in the shuddered kitchens of Istanbul, eyes watering with laughter, naked fingers peeling the diaphanous skins of onions.
One year later, and alone. On the balcony with the garbage between my legs, a cigarette burning down. The call to prayer, the mosques alight in the violent sky of dusk. You are greedy and vain, God says. I save your brother and give you a nephew and you fly an ocean and a sea away. The blood and mud, my fingers shredded. The quiet that comes afterward. I give you women and all you do is mourn their absence. The daylight failing to nothingness.
I am greedy, yes. And vain. I mourn, yes, but I write poems of celebration, a love letter in the form of a novel. You have cast me out. Made me a stranger in my own land. So here I am. At home only with my strangeness, with solitude and indifferent women and a city where no one speaks my language. You have tested me, and I have chosen abundance, which is not easy. All we are is pulp and water. We are raw flesh, bruised and lacerated. Flick of the hand, mud beneath the nail, blood on the wrist.
Is there a more richly symbolic act? Summers in the Midwest spent sitting beneath immense cloudless skies, shucking corn into wheelbarrows. Long boozy nights south of New Orleans sitting around vats of steaming shrimp and crawfish, the high tower of translucent exoskeletons, the murk and muck worked deep under your fingernails. In New England, summer days and seashores, white paper bibs and butter like liquid gold. The fracture and crack of lobster shells. Brothers in El Salvador peel oranges, knives flashing live sculptor’s chisels, mosquitoes caught in their sticky fingers. The slowest buys the next round of beer. Uncovered women sitting in the shuddered kitchens of Istanbul, eyes watering with laughter, naked fingers peeling the diaphanous skins of onions.
One year later, and alone. On the balcony with the garbage between my legs, a cigarette burning down. The call to prayer, the mosques alight in the violent sky of dusk. You are greedy and vain, God says. I save your brother and give you a nephew and you fly an ocean and a sea away. The blood and mud, my fingers shredded. The quiet that comes afterward. I give you women and all you do is mourn their absence. The daylight failing to nothingness.
I am greedy, yes. And vain. I mourn, yes, but I write poems of celebration, a love letter in the form of a novel. You have cast me out. Made me a stranger in my own land. So here I am. At home only with my strangeness, with solitude and indifferent women and a city where no one speaks my language. You have tested me, and I have chosen abundance, which is not easy. All we are is pulp and water. We are raw flesh, bruised and lacerated. Flick of the hand, mud beneath the nail, blood on the wrist.
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