A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Ball of String
When we visit, there is always chicken roasting
in a 9 x 13 pan, red potatoes quartered, glinting oil,
kosher salt pinched from Tupperware container.
My mother buys the chickens at Target or Jewel,
“all natural” printed on the package. I wonder
if she thinks about where the chicken comes from
before it’s encased in plastic wrap, what breed,
what color feathers, how fat this broiler is, whether
it was raised "cage free" or cloistered. Does she think
about the farm? In the photo album, black and white,
I see her standing and smiling wide outside the coop,
small child on a cinder block step collecting eggs,
one of a series of identical portraits with cousins
who visited but didn’t grow up on the farm.
These days her eggs are white and cradled in foam.
After Friday dinner, she goes to shul and says a prayer,
lights a candle for the dead, drinks a sip of grape juice
with the motzi, an Entenmann’s cookie from a box.
In her closet with albums and her suitcase,
a ball of string my grandmother wound around
and around from the strings of bakery boxes.
When I try to pull it apart to see what’s inside
at the core, she asks me not to unspool it.
Robin Silbergleid
Robin Silbergleid is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently In the Cubiculum Nocturnum (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). With collaborators from The ART of Infertility, she is co-editor of Infertilities, A Curation (Wayne State University Press, 2023). Born and raised in the Midwest, she currently lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she is Professor of English at Michigan State University.
