Family

 

—Poetry by Linda Klein, Los Angeles, CA

—Public Domain Artwork

THE LIVE CHICKEN MARKET

My mother sent me with Aunt Doris, while she stayed home with my baby brother, Michael.  I was five.

In those days, no one in our family owned a car.  Aunt Doris and I walked to Blake Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn through Miller Park, a diagonal route.  The park lanes were so narrow we could smell the lunches old people were eating as they talked to each other, sitting on wooden-slatted benches.

On Blake Avenue, the curb was lined with push carts selling produce.  Up on the sidewalk we soon came to a store that looked more like a garage.  It was filled with the strong odor of unwashed, live chickens, hundreds of them, squawking from their boxes, squashed together, a profusion of white, black, and brown feathers.  They had a lot to complain about.

A man with a black, curly beard greeted us.  Aunt Doris called him Nate.  He wore a white kippah on his head and was wiping his hands on a once-white bloody apron.

Aunt Doris pointed to three chickens.  Nate pulled them out of their box with his filthy gloves and threw them all together into a cloth sack.  I watch his every move.

We waited while Nate went into a room inside.  Soon I heard a sound I had never heard before, a screech, a gurgle.  I looked up at Aunt Doris, who patted my back and she took my hand and brought me outside.

We walked over to Rosie sitting outside, plucking black feathers from a limp chicken.  On the ground around her was a circle of feathers.  Rosie smiled at me, but I just stared back at her shyly.  Aunt Doris told me later that her real last name was Flicker, which means plucker in Yiddish.  We both laughed at that, Rosie was a chicken flicker.

Then Nate reappeared, carrying our chickens in a basin.  They lay so still.  I looked at them and thought, this is what dead is.

 

 

 

 

                                                                
FIFI

January, 2019

A doll, her blond hair disheveled, otherwise appears well put together in her short, gray velvet jacket and multi-colored plaid skirt, sits on the top shelf of my etagere in the dining room, just to the left of a small, thick-leafed cactus plant, a blank look on her yellowing face.  Through the years her jacket has become embedded with gray dust, which has made it look more plush.


August, 2010

I look through hundreds of photographs.  I want to store them on my computer.  When I see one of myself at the age of four, sitting on a brick ledge that surrounds the hospital across the street from our apartment, I stop.  I have a miserable, defeated expression on my face.  Sitting beside me is my Aunt Sylvia, wearing a dark suit and a white, ruffled blouse.  Her honey-colored hair is upswept in a Betty Grable coif.  She is holding Michael, my baby brother, cupped loosely in the curve of her right arm.  In her left hand she has the doll.  She is offering it to Michael and he is reaching out to grab the doll's hair.


May, 1944

Aunt Sylvia came to our little apartment for a visit.  She brought her camera to take some photographs of my brother and me.  Sylvia was my mother's older sister, single and independent.  This time she brought me a fancy doll, the prettiest doll I had ever received.

"I couldn't resist."  Sylvia tells my mother.  "Doesn't she look just like Linda, Sally?"  I smiled, cradling the doll in my arms.  She did have my hair and eyes.  She was mine.

My mother put a light blue, knitted hat on Michael's head and we went outside to our usual spot for family photos, the maternity hospital across the street, where eight months earlier, Michael had been born.

"Take your new doll, Linda," Aunt Sylvia directed.  "What will you call her?"  "Fifi," I replied, looking at the doll instead of my aunt, in case she might disapprove of the name.

Aunt Sylvia gave my mother her camera and she took Michael from her.  She had me sit on the ledge, holding Fifi, while she sat beside me with Michael.  My delight soon ended when Sylvia shifted Michael to her right arm and took the doll from me.  Fifi would never look the same again.

"No!" I screamed.  I want to hold Fifi."  There was no arguing with Aunt Sylvia.  She made the decisions and everyone else complied.  My mother snapped the photo of the smiling Sylvia as she offered baby Michael my doll, with me feeling terrible.  My hair had somehow become as messy as Fifi's would forever be.

 

 

 

With Fifi

 

                                                          
THE COURTHOUSE

In a dreary courthouse in lower Manhattan, before a judge, parade grimy grifters,
petty thieves, and socially-scarred shoplifters.

An impressionable child arrives with her battered aunt, a store detective.
Aunt Sylvia was someone the girl never considered effective.

Making their way to the assigned courtroom, ascending mottled marble stairs,
they are greeted by many with smiles and curious stares.

Aunt Sylvia, her left eye bruised and patched,
beams and points to her niece with a hand that is scratched.

The girl wonders how her aunt knows so many people,
men and women in suits and uniforms, and an impressive-looking couple.

Inside the courtroom, they sit in highly polished chairs. The bailiff calls a name;
though the name is not her own,  Sylvia rises and goes forward just the same.

A policeman grips the arm of a grimacing young man and brings him to the bench.
The ruffian waves his fist at Aunt Sylvia and calls her a bitch.

The judge has Sylvia tell her story, then questions the sulky boy.
The aunt speaks as though she has done this many times before.

                  *    *    *    *    *   *   *   *   *   *

When we were leaving the courthouse, I asked my aunt if she had won.
She told me to look at the shoplifter, being led away in handcuffs and
        having no fun.

The two of us then met a friend of Sylvia's and went to Schrafft's for lunch,
a policewoman named Helen, who said she had a hunch.

I would one day be a detective,  Her prediction was a strong one.
I only laughed and told her, "M'am, your prediction is a wrong one.”

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

—George Burns

____________________

Linda Klein has sent us three prose poems today, and we thank her for that! Don’t forget that tonight, 7:30pm, Literary Lectures presents a talk at Zoom (us02web.zoom.us) by Sacramento Poet Laureate Emeritus Bob Stanley: "The Poetry of Carolyn Forché”: an analysis of the poet’s war poem (see poemanalysis.com/carolyn-forche/the-colonel)/. Facebook info: www.facebook.com/events/1323163534731288/.

—Medusa

 

 

 

All in the family

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Family