Ancestral by Ivy Raff

Ancestral

On the good days, my grandmother’s kitchen
smelled of cloves baking in batter.

On the bad days – acrid of cabbage. She’s dead
ten years or eleven. I’m sad to say we beat her

into submission, at some point in her sixties, with
our Amyerikan tastes. Our loathing for borscht

ultimately smacked down Russian staunchness.
She survived genocide and ghettoization but not

her grandchildren refusing her food.
The sweet things, we wanted

to keep: butter-streaked Pyrex
pans of noodle kugel, rugelach nestled

like plump jammy babies in Tupperware.
She stopped baking eventually too – doctors warned

of the gale-force that pressured my grandfather’s
vessels. Now that I’m a middle aged Eastern European

woman myself I know too intimately our certainty our men
grow sick because of us. I know too intimately my grandmother’s

guilt, convicted for Marvin’s medical pressures.
The great clanging dough mixer stood silent, pristine,

glinting on the counter like old Cadillacs I saw once
at a design museum in Detroit. Relics. Perfect. Useful –

except they’d kill you, crash your skull or arteries.
My grandfather outlived her, resurrected rugelach,

picked it with knotted fingers out of flimsy deli plastic.
You know the kind.

*

Ivy Raff is a nomadic poet who calls Queens, New York home. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies including Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Midway Journal, West Trade Review, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Annual, and the London Independent Story Prize Anthology. Ivy is the author two poetry collections: What Remains / Que queda (Editorial DALYA, bilingual English/Spanish edition forthcoming 2024), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize; and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.”