Denise Alden
she/her
Denise Alden’s poetry can be found in Rogue Agent, Glass Mountain, Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic, and elsewhere. She was a teaching artist/community member of Witness Writers, a group that met monthly for generative workshops, while she lived in the Twin Cities. She values writing in community and exploring craft from perspectives that often have been ignored or erased. A poet by nature, she has taught classes on the pantoum, the ghazal and the sonnet. She is currently writing a novel and lives with her husband above a very lively intersection in Coyoacán in Ciudad de México.
Overview: Reconnecting with my ancestors has been an essential part of my learning and unlearning. When I acknowledge what my ancestors lost in order to become white, I begin to understand the deep roots of white supremacy in myself. This piece is an excerpt from a larger work that imagines my great-grandmother Katherine’s life in early twentieth-century Minneapolis.
“We don’t have the money,” Katarina said. “We’ll have to go to the workhouse again.” She thought of the building’s red brick facade towering over her as she waited for Karol to be released last time. Katarina had walked for nearly two hours and had to cross the river to get there.
Karol tried to hide his sigh by lighting his pipe; she hated his sighs. Katarina hated a lot of things, this hard woman of his. Karol sucked the pipe a few times before he said, “We can’t leave them alone–”
“They’ll be fine,” Katarina cut him off. “Charlie is already eight years old. I was younger than that when my mother died.”
Karol ignored her refrain of when she lost her mother and said instead, “Perhaps Stanislawa next door can look in on them?”
“Stanislawa? I don’t trust her,” Katarina said.
“Who do you trust?” Karol continued to puff on that damned pipe of his. Karol trusted everyone; that’s partly why they were in this mess. He invited everyone to their “parties,” where they sold their home-brewed corn liquor.
“How do you know Stanislawa won’t go to the police? They don’t even know we have children. That’s the only reason they didn’t take them during the raid!”
Karol looked out the door, which was open to let in the unseasonably warm April air, and saw Charlie and Sophie playing in the dirt near the chickens. Charlie was big for his age, almost a meter and a half tall. He held a long stick and the gleam in his eye signaled he was about to poke the birds. Sophie was tasting the dirt, sticking her tongue out in distaste before putting another bit of the ground in her mouth again. Sophie was almost six years old, but she seemed much younger than that to Karol. She talked up a storm, but her words, in both Polish and English, were nonsensical more often than not. Charlie was in school, but they’d kept Sophie at home so far, though she was hardly the help Katarina wanted. Sophie sang and talked endlessly, mostly to herself, but also to the chickens, the grass, and everything in the garden. She even made conversation with the still where they made their corn liquor. Never bothered by the lack of response, Sophie just moved onto her next captive audience.
Karol looked back at Katarina. “How long this time?”
“I don’t know, I can’t read the paper.” She paused, trying to remember. “What did the sheriff say? Three months?”
“It will be too late to plant anything when we get back,” Karol said. “We don’t have food for them for three months, do we?” Karol thought again about the cash in their hiding place; surely they could use some of it for a bribe, or maybe even the fine, but wasn’t sure if he’d survive Katarina’s wrath. The time she found him thumbing the wad of filthy bills she lunged at him with a ferocity of a wild animal. As Katarina stood and counted the money, Karol wondered at her instincts: he could not remember ever seeing her that protective of their children.
Karol remembered the early months after Charlie was born: either Katarina worked outside or sat inside and stared at nothing in particular. She fed the baby, but only when Karol picked him up and brought him to her. Karol knew as little as she did about babies, but he knew something wasn’t right. The little one’s crying broke his heart while it only seemed to enrage Katarina. Karol wasn’t an angry man, he just wasn’t built that way. Besides, Katarina’s anger was enough for the both of them.
Charlie’s scream brought Karol back to the present: the boy poked the wrong hen and she pecked his ankle sharp enough to draw blood. Charlie cried and threw both himself and his stick on the ground. Sophie looked up for a moment, then resumed her conversation with the other members of the flock.
“Zatrzymać!” Katarina roared at Charlie. “Zamknij się!”
Stop crying? Karol wondered. But he knew crying was another thing she hated.
Katarina marched outside and grabbed Charlie’s arm; airborne, he looked like a boy-shaped Zeppelin on a string. Charlie stopped crying: he had learned this lesson the hard way. When he landed he began to stomp off toward the house but Katarina said, “Go collect the corn,” and nodded toward a pail on the stoop. Charlie kept his grumbling low as he took the pail and made his way to the railroad tracks at the back of the yard.
Katarina’s eyes burned into the back of his head but her mind wandered as Charlie began to pick up the errant grain. She was almost eight years old when her mother Lidia died after a long, damp spring of wracking coughs punctuated by bloody phlegm. Her mother insisted the children keep away from her, even though she knew Katarina thought it punishment, not protection: Lidia didn’t have the strength to explain it to her again. Katarina stayed with Lidia in their hut while the older children were in the forest, collecting mushrooms and fallen branches. The hops were beginning to sprout and the bees slowly woke up from their hibernation. The family buried Lidia on the first dry and sunny day that May; after the grave was covered, they all went back to work and spring was never again the same for Katarina.
Her father Paul was a woodsman who sold their foraged goods, as well as pitch resin, in the nearest village. He and Lidia had grown up in the forest, saw it as their home, but outsiders saw it differently. They believed the forest was full of dangers that became fairy tale warnings they told their children to get them to behave. Fairies, sprites, wood nymphs, and packs of roaming bandits were all whispered about in bedtime stories that helped to create deep suspicion of ci z lasu.
Katarina heard different tales about the forest. In those stories, the forest was their home, the place that held, cared for and protected her family. This land she lived on now, an ocean and a continent and a half away, had a great river and many lakes, but no forest. There were trees, but no deep pine green black sea surrounded her. Foraging was impossible here, too: they had only the meager spillover of corn from the boxcars to collect and distill.
Still, Minneapolis was better than Detroit, the city she’d first lived in after she came to America. Her uncle was a drunkard whom no one liked. Even his drinking companions knew he was cruel, and often stepped in before his inebriation caused more than a hangover. Katarina asked her aunt, his wife, to come to Minneapolis with her several times, but when Katarina realized she wouldn’t leave the miscreant, she traveled by herself at the invitation of a friend of a friend of a relative. Then she met Karol and that was that.
Katarina’s losses compounded over the years. Her longing for the forest, her forest, became immense: she was ensconced by it in her dreams, and sometimes during the day she’d look up from collecting eggs or weeding their dry patch of a garden and for a moment she’d be fooled into thinking she was back home. She’d scan the sky for the cathedral arch of trees then realize she was still here in this cold place, far from her maternal boscage.
The city’s wild plant life was mostly suffocated by concrete sidewalks; before long, Katarina lost the little knowledge of plant medicine she had. Her neighbors weren’t helpful, either; many of them spoke Polish but were from the north of Poland or had been here long enough to abandon the old ways. They weren’t forest people, either, but soon enough realized she was, and started to keep their distance: old superstitions swirled around her like the nearby brewery’s malty smoke plumes.
One day Katarina made the mistake of asking one of her neighbors about mięta polej.
“What?” the woman’s face twisted into a frown.
“Mięta polej, for the blood,” Katarina said. Maybe it was the wrong word? The names of things were eternally confounding.
“For the blood?” the woman repeated.
“Ja, my blood is late so I take the herb to bring it,” Katarina began to explain, surprised the woman didn’t have this basic knowledge.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said and took a quick, careful step back to return to her own yard.
Katarina suspected the woman was lying: how could she not know about mięta polej? She wondered what else was lost, was no longer common here, and felt lonelier than ever.
Her brewing expertise was viewed just as suspiciously. Katarina learned the trade from her older brother, Josef, who told her she was a natural. The corn from the railroad tracks was different from the rye she’d used back home, but soon her brew was prized enough that people were willing to take the risk in buying it. Katarina was flabbergasted and outraged the first time Karol was arrested.
“Who can say what we brew?” she ranted at Karol. “Are they also going to tell us how many chickens we can have? What about our garden?”
“We can brew it,” Karol explained, “we just can’t sell it. Not without a license.” Before Prohibition, they’d heard from others that applying for a license was a waste of money: the fee simply went into some administrator’s pocket and unless you were willing to hound them for months in English, the license never materialized. Now those licenses were worthless for everyone; they simply carried on brewing and selling as surreptitiously as others did. They never paid the fine when they were caught, preferring to serve time. Of course, this became a problem when the children came along, but so far, only Karol had been charged. He went to jail while Katarina stayed with Charlie. Now they’d both been charged and Sophie was here, too.
She watched Charlie pick up the corn kernel by kernel and had to look away before she grabbed a switch to speed him up. She felt a tug on her hand.
“Mama,” Sophie croaked, her mouth circled in grey, “my tummy boli,” then promptly threw up.
“Chodź tu,” Katarina said as she wiped Sophie’s mouth. Maybe Karol was right. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to leave the children by themselves. Maybe they should ask Stanislawa for help. The workhouse, the children, and the forest swirled in Katarina’s head, then landed in her gut. That’s when she felt as though she had been eating dirt, too.
