Where the Bread Tasted Better

At the dinner table of my youth,
Daddy scoffed at the sliced Wonder bread
Mom brought home from the supermarket.

All his days in America, he longed
for hard rolls and rye.
“Good dense bread, not sponge!”

Every so often, I’d ask him why
he left the good bread in Europe
to live in a small American town,
without sauerbraten or strudel.

His answer was always the same,
delivered with a wry smile.
“The streets were paved with gold.”

A nice fable to feed a child.

I was in my twenties
before I understood the connection
between Hitler and my father’s
arrival in America, how his youth,
unlike mine, was marked by the need
to get out, to be one of the lucky ones,
before the Nazis reached his homeland,
where the bread tasted better
but the streets were paved with blood.

Strange Fruit

It’s always the last song
of the set. The waiters
stop service. Dishes don’t
clatter. The club goes silent.
The room goes dark.

Only a spotlight on the singer
with the white gardenias in her hair,
eyes closed until the haunting intro ends.

When her head tilts back, a voice
drifts into the crowd, soft as the “scent
of magnolias, sweet and fresh.”

She sings of “black bodies swinging
in the southern breeze,” bulging eyes
and twisted mouths, searing images
into our senses like the “smell of burning flesh.”

When the song ends, Billie Holiday leaves the stage.
No encore for this “strange and bitter crop,” the crows
should not pluck, the trees should not drop.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of three chapbooks, Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press), Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications), and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Beltway Poetry News, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Potomac Review, Inkwell, Hospital Drive, and Imitation Fruit. She lives in Arlington, Virginia. Visit her online at https://metaphoricaltruths.blogspot.com/