My Grandfather Was A Numbers Man

There was a plane crash in Burma, India –   
my American grandfather tells me this excitedly
while sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway outside
his bedroom in the assisted living facility where he resides. 
He is animated and describes the crash:
smoke chaos confusion fear—
fellow soldiers had died. This was my first time 
hearing this story. Grandpa was one hundred years old.

There were thirty-three years between my grandfather and my mother.
There are thirty-three years between my mother and me.
There are thirty-three years between my daughter and me.
That is ninety-nine years of generational multiplicity. 
But these are only numbers.

My Grandfather was a numbers man.
He always carried a pen and paper in his breast pocket.
Did arbitrary math while I patiently nodded along. 
I was a writer – what use did I have for numbers? 
But he kept meticulous track, complex mathematical equations,
yet he never seemed to factor in the aftermath of a plane crash during WWII. 

While Grandpa was escaping a burning Douglas C-47 or
Curtiss C-46 Commando, or a North American B-25 Mitchell Bomber, 
across lands and oceans, my Bubbe and Zeidy 
were escaping Zyklon-B and numbers. Numbers on arms.
Numbers on charts. Numbers on roll call. So many numbers.
They hid on a farm from a math that possessed cruel efficiency for subtraction. 

I like the unified dichotomy of it all – my maternal grandfather fighting 
for the redemption of my paternal grandparents. Like Einsteinian relativity. 

Grandpa wore his Veteran baseball cap every day atop
his weathered but imposing body. He was down to a mere collection 
of open and scabbing wounds; Bullous pemphigoid. It was art-worthy—
each fluid-filled blister oozing like forgotten memories recalled suddenly
before death. He scratched often at his skin, and it hurt to see it, all that
open flesh, pustule craters. It made you want to look away, 
like a plane crash. Like a crime against humanity.
He cried in that hallway. “Oh, Tali,” he says, but I can’t remember, 
I cannot recall what he said after my name.
I only remember my name and him crying.
But I think he saw numbers. 
I think he saw a math problem that couldn’t be solved. 

One hundred is a big number.
So is six million. 
So is one. 

My grandfather was a numbers man. 

Shabbat Dinner After October 7

It is a Friday night, and many extra flames flicker 
upon the top of the dining room buffet
beneath the oil canvas titled Mayim.
My fingers are greasy with chicken oil
and beside me sit
girls, girls, girls;
daughters and they are laughing. 
One has shot soda out of her nose
and another is pointing, and another is twirling
before our large oval wall mirror and the room
is full of their shrieking, and everything is echoing,

reflecting, reverberating all these 
girls, girls, girls
and I hold a chicken wing between both my hands. 
The lights are flickering and the daughters, the 
girls, the girls, the girls
are snickering and I am marveling 
at the ease with which I can split these delicate hollowed
bird bones with one quick snap of my fingers and 
I am picturing the pelvic bones of women who were only ever 
girls, girls, girls 
who once shot soda out of their nose in a fit 
of laughter and the ways in which their legs could be 
spread with the same hungry ease in which 
I rip apart the two ends of this wing. 
The way legs were splayed. Split. How a woman, how 
girls, girls, girls
could be torn and demolished and broken
like the fragile wings of a bird.
I try not to look up, to behold a room
full of chicken wings and
girls, girls, girls —
Jewish girls, one of which is still twirling, dancing
and it’s all I can do to not think of a dreadlocked
girl dancing and dancing as I tear the meat off 
the bones, chew slowly until I cannot anymore,
until I drop the bones on a porcelain plate
and wonder what the breaking pelvic bones of women of
girls, girls, girls
sounds like – what it must look like to ravish two ends
of a wounded wing that will never again take flight.