Comfort Food
Every morning of my first year, my mother’s father drove over at dawn to bathe me and walk with me among trees, touching my tiny fingers to things as he named them, saying, bark, saying, web, saying, air and grandfather and granddaughter, all to say, Welcome; I have waited so long for you. At a family dinner, he fed me berries, my first solid food. When he whistled, I pressed my nose to his nose, eyes shut tight as my grandmother’s were, years later, against those many mourners clutching hors d’oeuvres uneaten, barbed with toothpicks, crowding her home, speaking relentlessly of this man she’d loved for half a century, whose side of the bed was suddenly cold. My arm around her shoulders, we rocked to a dirge only she heard, a growing gale that broke from her in a cry without bottom or sides, a keening that now lives in me alone, along with the grapple of her lungs, years later, in those last days as I rubbed lotion onto her bone-latticed back, eased water through her lips, the rend of each breath as she begged us to help her go, the consuming remorse that I couldn’t, that I hadn’t, done what she asked. At his grandfather Abraham’s death, Jacob made a simple stew to comfort his father. Lentils, the Talmud said, because they’re round as the wheel of mourning that touches each of us in turn; lentils, because they have no seam as a mourner has no mouth, silenced as we are by sorrow. In the middle of my life, as I cook, I hum—that close-mouthed, compromised song—lamentation the only tune I can carry. Death: the creation story in reverse, blood becoming earth, red lentils mulching to brown in the pot. At the counter, I stand and eat: yielding as wet soil, heavy as grief, a stubborn grain between the teeth: nothing to bite down on, filling all the same. To my dead, I sing, I have waited so long for you.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/ PenguinRandomHouse), which she co-authored with her wife Nickole Brown. Unalone, her collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis will be out from Four Way Books in 2024. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, she is the founder of Yetzirah, a literary organization for Jewish poets.
