dance dance - amelia pozniak

When I get low and fed up of packaging noodles I get this need to go. Go somewhere warmer for the summer and order packaged noodles there instead. I can’t eat the food I prepare. Every bite tastes of the skin-jam residue from hands folding dry noodles: 8oz, 12oz, 16oz at a time. Stuffed into parchment wrap and lifted onto trays where they are stale and cozy with the rats until they are dipped into pots of water and boiled clean of the kitchen muck and that nail bed touch. My own noodles, I sit with them in the kitchen for so long, on a three-legged stool folding and reciting to keep time, that neither of us can forget each other. When I swallow, I fear I might ingest myself by mistake.

On my name tag it says Hanni not Hannah. Names with “ah” sound ‘old country’, sound from before the world was split in two. “Ha” is ok though, otherwise I’d be “An”. An, who packages noodles, An with the good front teeth. On a diet of noodle broth they are shiny and white. In the streets, people stop me to ask what my parents do for a living, to have a daughter with such nice molars. I give them a coupon for 5-4-1 All Night Noodles, the answer to their problems, the cure to all their ills. 

Tess told me to try and lose the scissors, put them away as hard as I could so I couldn’t shorten my hair. Once a month, they come to the apartment and we do our best to find them again for trims. No more than once a month, add an extra two weeks before cutting if our hair is brittle and we haven’t eaten, trim half as much. If I’m mistaken for a boy they will hand me a gun and a paper vest made by first graders at the elementary school in the valley beneath the city. They’ll send me with the troops on the road that goes past the elementary school and out the gates. A march of the young and the already dead: backpacks on tight, guns strapped to their stomach, eyes on the sky. No birds fly there anymore; we made them all into soup. Tucked under the radio antenna in the unusable-now basket, I find the spare shears and cut my bangs short, straight, black. Smooth, always wet, baby bangs reach my eyebrows. I cut them too short. I pull them over my eyes like baby’s hands pull on father’s face. 

In school they told me I could be a writer, then they sent me to the kitchen to use my hands there. There I starve. Watch the noodles stir in the pot, watch the shapes they form. Like  intestines in soup water, like noodles in the river. A nameless river becomes the sea, the only sea we have left. Riversea red like cherry, lips like cherry, baby bangs and stained teeth and packaged lunches, off to school, off to war, under the big blue sky with no birds, there is only soup.

Amelia Pozniak is a writer and artist from the Hudson Valley, New York. She has been previously published in NAME Magazine and the Lavender Review.