-road starts somewhere-

The potato has blind eyes

a parched skin
the scent of water

trapped inside it

and laboring the few
crooked furrows behind his house, 

my great grandfather

from the northern provinces

pulled them out of the earth by hand,

sacked them and sold them in the central
marketplace in the town of Lucca.

In her city, my mother, his granddaughter,

had the hands of fine linen,— an after-
scent of bleach and she pulled potatoes

from the bins of Maretti’s market,

corner of Bedford and Wall,
third-base side of the park,
south-side face of the church,

walked them home in their dusty
brown-paper bags,
right field of the park
across the street from the gas station where
the scent of leaded fuel danced
with the scent of simmering tomato sauce
inside the first-floor tenement where
she peeled them in the kitchen sink
under running water with a knife
blade to thumb, the cascading peels
rolling to their ends,

washed them-up, cubed them

and boiled them in either one of two pots

deep enough to require the strength of handles

paired at their sides;

the same deep pots used to cook spaghetti,
to humidify the air atop the space-heater in winter;

the same deep pots her husband, my father,
removed from the gas-stove burners, transporting
bathwater to the tub and I’m closer to home

on the road from where it was that I began.


                                                  Quequechan