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.