Still Life With Fruit Fork, Hollóháza Plate

after Emily Jungmin Yoon’s “News”; with revised lines from C.D. Wright’s “In a Word, a World”

Fatherlessness is a fruit fork. Tines of a sky-vast hunger
Jab at my great grandfather’s vacant plate. Tines rise, wait

At the barn door of my grandmother’s mouth like silver biblical magi
With only myrrh resin–resembling dried apricot–as a gift. She does open,

Always. Always hopeful. Wide as the O in hopeful. Another forkful of nothing.
More of this: chewing the cud of nothing, goat like, with asymmetrical jaws.

He left. Suffered from Trianon Syndrome. Took his own life in 1925. And that growling
Apricot stone of my grandmother’s stomach has not gone silent since.

There is a reason it is called leave taking. Always taking.
She chafed her purpling hands for heat in those cold Hungarian winters.

Nő meaning woman is homonymous with nő meaning
To grow. No, my grandmother did not grow fully into a woman, not really.

(Stray girls stay girls.)

Fél meaning afraid is homonymous with fél meaning half.
My grandmother is fearfully half a self. As I am. A partridge, fogoly (in the pear

Tree of the want of my father). A prisoner, fogoly, in that hardwood
Aviary of his absence. The wounded ghost of the girl I was–little grey

Partridge, little Hun–has a woodwind instrument for a syrinx,
And with it, she plays only these rust-touched songs of father grief;

Songs my grandmother plays, even today, for the figment of her father. His name:
Dezső, meaning desired, meaning wanted. Want, then, unwants what is not want.

Grief, then, ungriefs what is not grief. Father, then, unfathers
What is not father. My grandmother & I are oboe-throated, even now.

Holding fruit forks in our house, where father famine
Is handed down like a cracked Hollóháza plate.

Mackenzie Schubert is a Hungarian-American poet. She resides in Ithaca, NY, where she is a first year MFA candidate at Cornell University. Her present work explores postmemory, her grandmother's history as one of the 200,000 refugees of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the intergenerational repetition of fatherlessness.