1
German soldiers trucked my mother
from her Polish farm to a German labor camp,
a cluster of textile factories. Hundreds of women
roosted inside makeshift henhouse barracks
hemmed by electric fences embroidered with barbed wire.
An orchestra of machines braided hemp fibers
in her factory, spun spider webs of rope
zinging overhead, taut as violin strings. They loaded
massive bellies of wooden spools pregnant
with coiled cable and rope onto waiting trucks
16 hours each day. At night, in their delirium of hunger,
the women rehashed rumors. If the Germans
won the war, they’d machine-gun all
the women in camp, torch their bodies in open pits.
2
In America my mother shivered telling me
this story while cooking chicken legs for dinner.
I was five and listened for boots storming up
the stairs to our apartment.
She recounted how her mother taught her,
a farm child, to kill chickens by hand—to wring
their necks and, with one quick twist, snap off
their heads. The bodies strung upside down
to bleed out. Her soft girlish hands gripped
a chicken’s thin scaly feet to dip the carcass into
boiling water before plucking its soggy feathers.
In our Boston kitchen, before cramming
chicken legs into a frying pan, she dragged each one
through a stovetop’s gas flames to burn off all
wispy traces of feathers and quills. I listened to
the music of bluish-yellow flames sizzling
across the goose-bump landscape of chicken skin,
crowding the kitchen with its acrid stench.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
John Pijewski’s book of poems, Dinner with Uncle Jozef, was published by Wesleyan University Press. He received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently published poems in Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Tampa Review.
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