At the Table of Bread

I am at a table that is not mine but I have sat here

 late into the night with my children

and on it’s back torn the braids of the day old Challah

my daughter brought home from her dishwashing job

 in the kitchens of Bread Euphoria.

I have laid down my knife and broken the clever braids

though I am not of that tradition,

 the twelve tribes separating and making their rounds

to every seat underneath a bright wash of beaten egg

until they fell away into crumbs.

Ours were the dry unleavened wafers that adhered like paste

to the roof of your mouth at communion, while you tried to not notice

 how your were choking on so many unsaid words, that hostia cementing

your throat, that host, sacrificial victim itself, without any choice

in the matter of its own consecration.

 Now a bowl of vintage valentines and an Iroquois heart

beaded with the word “Montreal” pays tribute to my ancestors,

my grandmother Josephine’s’ sliver candlesticks I pawned once

 then left in an attic in a Maine farmhouse with my children’s father

before the three of us fled south.

This is not the table of my mother

where we sat as children, knowing her own tonsils had been taken

from her throat as a child right where the porcelain tureen of clam chowder

 had been set down, thick and steaming before us this table, this one here on loan

to me has touched both Challah and the shank end of the ham, been prayed over at Shabbat, has spent summers in the south, been stained with tomato pudding and scraped raw by the oysters grey and mother of pearl shells from the Chesapeake bay, felt all that joy and known those all those dead and living things brought to bear on it.