Domestic Economics

Sudden silence, the refrigerator motor

cycling off. The psht of water filling

ice maker, half-moon cubes transparent

and white—fingernails whose color doesn’t

vary much body to body. Your dark fingers

swizzle ice in whiskey; you say slaves made

Aristotle possible. Chinese girls, twelve

to a factory dorm room, make my

sneakers possible. I never learned to sew,

the black wheel of my grandmother’s Singer

large as a steam locomotive, the needle a silver

blur as my sister’s fingers fed kelly green cloth

into its stabbing path. You dodge ghosts

on the road, grief squeezing your lungs: children

stacked in a ditch, flaming thatch, your aunt

cradling her head in her lap—I thought

it all so primitive. Thought Hutsul my mother’s

maiden name, not a tribe. Their village stripped even

of seed grain; like rats and grasshoppers, the dead

eaten without ritual. Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Russian:

language a sticky binding, the egg my mother

mixed with leftover mashed potatoes, molded

into patties, fried a filigree brown. It’s an accident

of birth, what we consume. This side-by-side model

with its glass shelves, vegetable and meat drawers—

I have more food than it can hold.