Back to Issue Twelve

 

"Sinew" by Barbara Krasner

Sinew

Sucking bones clean in my family

is a female tradition. Chicken bones,

beef shank bones, beef knee bones,

roasted, boiled, braised. The ability

to pick off the last bit of meat or gristle,

to slurp any juices.

 

My mother presented me with the cow knee bone

that flavored her mushroom barley soup

as if it were a gift from the heavens.

The size of my palm, its caves

offered fat and juice, its sides endless opportunity

to suck and gnaw until the exterior blanched

into bleached cliff. It could take an hour or more

to suck this bone clean, a way for my mother, Leah,

and her mother, Reizl, and her mother, Esther Toby,

to extend a meal or keep children busy.

 

My father left his steak bone on his plate

for the vulture, as I was called. If I ordered

roast prime rib in a restaurant, I asked

for a doggie bag. I was the doggie,

chewing on that bone for a long time afterward.

 

I suck ancestral bones clean,

pick off names, dates, and places. I extract

the lifeblood that is mine to inherit,

to honor from whose veins

it flows. I suck bones clean

like Leah, Reizl, and Esther Toby,

all of us gnawing past centuries.