Yumpu_Catalogue_Peacemaking

An Apple from Dachau
It's the eighteenth day of Nissan,
the first month of the Jewish year, April 21st –
Passover's third day. I’m on a backways cobblestone street.
"Liebling" a woman selling apples says to me
but I don't speak German. She smiles, and nods
to the euro coins in my palm.
It's one fine apple, shining up at me
from the center of my hand. And still
I have no idea how to be sacred.
Any fruit, even just the core
or shed skin, is holy when you’re lonely.
At dusk, with a cup of rum-laced tea, I watch
out my window to where the vendors stay out at their carts
until the light goes dead, eating whitefish
from wax paper, and one half of an orange.
Something so beautiful as to give up seed
is lonely, and to shed its skin for hunger is holy.
If you plant an apple seed in the far town field
where snow never stays, even in winter,
and that seed lives, it’s a holy, holy thing.
Not like Gefilte fish. Right now
thirteen hours east, my mother
is in Brooklyn buying two pounds
of Whitefish, Carp and Pike flesh,
chances are the fishmonger
knows her: You'll never find bones,
it's why my relatives always have
Passover at my parent's house.
Keep the shed skin, my mother will tell the Fishmonger
but she's keeping the head, seed and core. The first
spring I remember smelling those fresh
fish bones, I was five. It was the salt smell
fleshwork of my young hunger. My mother will grind