I fell in love with your face in a black and white photo,
in the archive of a museum about Jews who died.
Plenty are still alive. Not you.
You posed for this camera in 1949,
at a dress-up dinner in some curtained room where lace draped and
polished knives cut roast instead of the throats of
our enemies—the swine. Everyone squeezed into
tiny circular spectacles waiting
for the old fashion flash to signal
they could eat.
“When I eat,” the joke goes, “everyone is dead.”
Did you know that one?
The poor girl next to you is blurred. She moved.
The man across the table has the face of my grandpa Shapiro,
son of Russian immigrants, a family who abandoned their brick business
to the angry mobs of Kyiv. You.
Your plump lips shine like cutlery, the shape of your eyes
like the tribe we belong to, maybe a Robinowitz, maybe
an Isenstein, not a sister but a lover, still familiar. I could kiss
your brown nose and whisper a mazel tov if
you get my drift, though my jokes may pass you by as
crass or cryptic if you didn’t speak English. This could be Poland. It could be
New York. The way you hold your fork makes me wish I was silver.
Those lips haven’t kissed for decades. I feel dirty just thinking about
what they look like
right now.
____________
Aaron Gilbreath has written for The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Paris Review Daily, The Jewish Book Council, The Dublin Review, Sierra, The New York Times, On Being Jewish Now, and Spin. His last book, The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His essays have been notables in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Sports Writing.