My Mother's Birds Poem by Cecilia Woloch

My mother's Polish nickname was the word for dried-up; sticks —Sucha, her mother called her. Little witch; Miss Skin-and-Bones. Fifth of eleven thin and startled children, all those mouths to feed. Okay: it was the Great Depression; everyone was poor. They baked potatoes over fires in the street, my mother said; dipped stale bread in buttermilk, ate what was put in front of them. And she was dark-eyed, dreamy, danced in vacant lots, played movie star. Tied her black hair up in rags; high-kicked through cinders, broken glass. Picked cigarette butts from the gutters for the pennies Dzia-dzia gave. Though CioaCia Helen down the hill, their crazy aunt, was better off. She gave them sweets, cheap sweets but sweet. She gave them Easter chicks one year. My mother took the tiny peeps and raised them tenderly, as pets. I've seen the photographs: their white wings all aflutter in her arms. As if such chickens could have flown, but they were meat, those birds she loved. Tough meat, and these were hungry years. And CioaCia raised the axe. My mother sobbed and couldn't swallow, nor could anyone, I've heard. The story goes she saved a few stray feathers, hid them, sang to them. Knelt above them weeping in the attic, just like church. Fed and watered them for months, her sisters laughed; the ghosts of birds. The way, years later, always singing, she would try to fatten us. Her own strange brood of seven children, raised less tenderly, perhaps. As if, this time, she wanted to be sure we'd get away. She'd set the steaming plates in front of us, still humming, cross her arms. Don't be afraid to eat, she'd say, because we were. We were afraid.