Like stomping on shredded cabbage
inside a fifty-gallon stoneware crock.
Like leaves slipping between your toes.
Like being doused in salt, fermenting in juices.
Like running home after school, ravenous,
slurping down a bowl of the raw sauerkraut
your Polish grandmother made every October,
if you had a grandmother, if she were Polish.
Like the cellar door falling shut, winter coming on.
Wine and spices and the vegetable dark.
This poem “How Was It for You?” originally appeared in Canadian Literature 216 (Spring 2013): 117.
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