Our Day of the Dead & Vanilla Kipfel

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Steven Luria Ablon

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Our Day of the Dead

We bring bacon and peanut butter sandwiches,
root beer floats, fried catfish. We bring
wiener schnitzel, food that our dead loved.

We bring photos of friends and family,
my grandmother sitting on a bench
on the boardwalk in Atlantic City,

my great grandfather standing proudly
before the butcher shop in Tupelo Mississippi.
We know they want to see us celebrating life.

Uncle Carl wants to hear us talking about family
golf games, my father wants to hear about that
rainbow trout that surprised us in the stream,

my aunt, Anne, wants to hear us talking about
the latest revival of My Fair Lady. We put on
some music, “You Belong With Me”.

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Vanilla Kipfel

In December when we make the vanilla Kipfel,
those white moon-shaped sugar cookies
my wife’s mother first made in the Austrian Alps.
Our family gathers at the white marble kitchen table
like singing the national anthem, each verse ingrained.

We knead the ingredients, flower, butter,
chopped walnuts, exact amounts, exact brands
and eventually in a miracle it coheres into a firm
brown Teig, a sacrament that rests overnight
in the pearly gates of the refrigerator.
In the morning small fingers, large fingers shape

little crescents baking them until like a marshmallow
over a fire there’s a hint of mahogany, then
showering vanilla sugar into every hidden crevasse.
Dozens of tins are filled, tied with a bow.
Grandchildren say it is the best family holiday.
They argue over who makes the best cookies,

which are grotesque, have to be eliminated,
which are sure to crumble and need to be eaten now.
Each year my wife weighs each element.
The recipe is secret. We share the cookies
but not the sacred ingredients from the Alps.
We are all covered in a blessing of white sugar.

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Steven Luria Ablon, poet and adult and child psychoanalyst, teaches child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and publishes widely in academic journals. He won Academy of American Poets’ Prize 1961 and the National Library of Poetry, Editor’s Choice Award 1994. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. His collections of poetry are Tornado Weather (Mellen Poetry Press, Lewiston, New York, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (The Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, California, 1997), Blue Damsels (Peter E Randall Publisher, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2005), Night Call (Plain View press, Austin, Texas, 2011}, and Dinner in the Garden (Columbia, South Carolina, 2018).

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