Andrea Hollander Poems

They decide finally not to speak
of it, the one blemish in their otherwise
blameless marriage. It happened
...

Long after I married you, I found myself
in his city and heard him call my name.
Each of us amazed, we headed to the café
...

The house felt like the opera,
the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,
but the cast not yet arrived.
...

Southern France, 1945

What young men won't do, my father wondered,
scalpel in hand, his army drabs stained red,
catching his breath beneath his surgeon's mask,
peering again into the body of this boy
he guesses joined up like all the rest:
to prove something. And my father's task
of cutting—cutting through tissue
and bone, using everything he's learned.
War is war, of course. He knows that.
His job: to keep these boys alive,
even the Germans, to cut past
gangrened flesh. Afterwards
the intricate suturing, the mangled
limbs removed from the antiseptic table
by someone else. How he's able
to do this, hour after hour, one body
becoming another, he doesn't know.
He thinks of this now in Brooklyn
walking down Court Street to the barber
past all the specialty shops—cheese wheels
from France, barrels of pickles,
salmon and mussels on racks of ice,
rabbit carcasses, their skins removed,
hanging above displays of liver and chops.
Against his will the smell and the sound
of the saw he always had to use,
the feel of it, and in his arm the ache.
...

A woman is born to this:
sift, measure, mix, roll thin.

She learns the dough until
it folds into her skin and there is

no difference. Much later
she tries to lose it. Makes bets

with herself and wins enough
to keep trying. One day she begins

that long walk in unfamiliar woods.
She means to lose everything

she is. She empties her dark pockets,
dropping enough crumbs

to feed all the men who have ever
touched her or wished.

When she reaches the clearing
she is almost transparent—

so thin
the old woman in the house seizes

only the brother. You know the rest:
She won't escape that oven. She'll eat

the crumbs meant for him, remember
something of his touch, reach

for the sifter and the cup.
...