Potatoes Don’t Have Much to Do with Light
BY JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH
Frying them up and singing,
I teach my son
our people are scattered
seeds and wax-drops clinging
to every surface fire has left
immune to flame,
Blessed are You, Baruch atah,
he eats too many to count,
Adonai Eloheinu, golden and dripping
with sunflower oil and soaked
in apples, though potatoes
have little to do
with stealing fire from the gas stove,
Sovereign of all, and carrying it
on my fingertips, Melech haolam, to the candles
in the window, but everything
to do with the season of killing
ducks, so that their rendered fat
can be found in any house
along with a forgotten
December onion,
who hallows us, along with light
enough for eight evenings,
asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav,
and at midnight, my son
exhales an entire latke and is afraid
of what his body leaves behind,
so he clings to me like wax,
all night refusing his bed,
all night burrowing
all thirty pounds of him
into my bones, commanding us
to kindle, v'tsivanu l'hadlik
and in the morning, ner shel,
when he is extinguished enough
to stay in his own room, I wake
to find him surrounded in white—
Tylenol, ibuprofen, Band-Aids,
gauze, the first-aid kit I thought
was out of reach, scattered
across the floor like a harvest
of winter potatoes,
and his swollen belly, aglow
with all our people’s
burning starch.
