We children perched on angel-legged iron benches
under an oil painting of white callas and silver candelabra.
Our card tables were enveloped in white linen
as if a second skin wrapped us tight.
We listened to the adults at the mahogany table,
to their mutterings, their shouts,
their slips of the tongue into English
when their language was not enough.
We gaped as their fists jabbed the air,
or pounded and pooled on the table.
Chins jutted from white collared necks.
Women's voices slit men's low growls.
A violin in the background tore the landscape apart.
Tuya pravda. They were unbeatable........

Kathleen Ripley Leo
Copyright 1995

My grandmother's hands could sculpt ponczke,
chisel mountains of dough and slap out
small circles for pierogis. She flattened
huge sheets for noodles and cooked great
pans of borscht and czarnina on the kitchen stove,
wrung the necks of fat hens,
sliced noodles, tender nipples of dough.
She drew up her flour to a tall cone,
funneled it with eggs and salty water,
gathered into the dough, and like an ocean wave, she kneaded it
back and forth, her arms and shape given up to it.
She taught me to roll up half dried sheets of dough
after they hung like crisp linens over front room chairs.
Each day she make it fresh, folded it up fat and long,
took her knife and sliced it into pieces for the soup.

Kathleen Ripley Leo
Copyright 1995