This piece will be published in the next issue of Island Writers' Magazine, accompanying a beautiful poem by someone I wish I had a name to give credit to... It is entitled "History"

Kids at school laughed, said he stank like squirrel stew 

or mouse shit, like an old suitcase, man, 

smell of the country he came from

maybe it was the sweater his grandmother knitted 

in her old kitchen, garlic and wild leek, the rabbit 

she caught, boiling in a pot on the peat hearth,

needles clicking smell into the wool

row after row. 

He threw the sweater in a dumpster on the way home from school. 

Bought a new one, red, white and blue 

at the five and dime with paper-route money

but the kids still laughed. He thought

something inside his skin must reek through the pores 

of his big hands, thin chest, 

maybe his grandmother’s life poured

out of his mouth with every breath his heart pumped, 

a foreign smell, stink in his blood, her stories living

in him, old words knitted beneath new. 

New words came to him in pieces 

but when he strung them together, he smelled shame 

for the place he’d come from, his grandmother’s childhood 

on the farm, her hands old at ten, look. 

How the soil starved during the war, manchik, she said. 

Acorns and thistles. 

And how, when she fled, the child she carried on her back 

lived almost to the border. 

Your uncle, she cried. Before your father was born, 

listen, manchik, weeping in her new kitchen

trying to reach him

trying to knit their worlds together.