the words on the tip of a mother tongue
are always the sweetest and the bitterest
don’t lend themselves to a literal translation from language to language
require notes, explanations
whenever my mother asks “aren’t you hungry?”
it means “how are you feeling?”
and sometimes I protest:
— to chew it up, place it inside my mouth
double-check that I swallowed —
is that your special form of coercion, mama?
— once you have your own kids, you’ll understand —
she answers
I would say that this would never happen
hang up the phone, get offended, sulk
yet the mother tongue gets passed down to me
now I speak it myself
at the very least, with my own self
when I decorate a holiday tree
and hang up bonbons alongside the ornaments
when there’s food left on my plate
and I cannot bear to throw it out into trash
forcing myself to swallow it
I remember when my grandma
always talked us into clearing out our plates
and we ate for mama, for tato, for baba, and for dido
for all the relatives from the photos in the family album
until our plates were completely clean
to this day we eat for those relatives
who a century ago
half a century ago
and even just this past year
suffered from hunger
now I come home
and I ask my child
aren’t you hungry, my baby?
have you had something to eat?
and whatever the answer may be
I persuade her to eat something
to see the evidence of her fullness
in these home-cooked meals
the whole history of the past millennium
people let out of captivity
weeping at the sight of an apple
the millions starved in the famine
with swollen abdomens
in this talk about food I see the battlefield
the deceased and the fallen –
people so close to me and yet so far
we pass on history from parents to children with food
we chew through history with the mouths of our children
gnawing it quietly so that the special services won’t hear
but I’ll translate it for you:
when one could get executed
for possessing documents in Ukrainian [1918, 2022]we obtained our documents in Russian
when one could get charged with terrorism
for speaking Ukrainian [1930’s-50’s]we switched to the Soviet tongue
when our local dishes were called
nationalist propaganda [1960’s-70’s]
we ate what everyone else was eating
so I’m sorry if you’re still swallowing
this history of surviving
food not for pleasure
but for nourishment
to be the thing that you eat
to be like everyone else
the one that won’t be starved to death
or sent off to a concentration camp
but wait, there was a form of protest
our grandmas baking easter bread
and calling it “cake”
tricking the ears of informers
and in childhood we saved the wrappers
from chocolate candy
and inserts from “love is…” gum
as proof that we get pleasure
from the sweets we consume
slowly I’m compiling our explanatory dictionary of food
word to word, dish to dish
some of them are about death
but many are about life
I’ll definitely give it to you to read
so that you’ll be the first child in the world
who stops eating
for all the dead relatives
and learns to eat only for herself
because for the work of mourning
over our fallen, tortured, and starved to death
we will take back our own words
and when you grow up
I’ll call you and ask
no matter how much I want to say something else
I’ll just ask:
how are you feeling, my love?
