My grandmother was a sentinel of her language – 
Babcia a legislated word warranting a silent Sunday dinner.
She kept a fast watch over how much margarine 
we allotted to our bread. 

It’s sacred, you know. The body. 
She crackled the Lord’s Prayer, 
if not hasty for being so familiar,
then surely for being too forgiving. 

I hold it against her now as I jostle through
the Wieliczka salt mines, that I cannot fit
these sounds into my anatomy,
and I’ve become something different altogether
from what I was promised. 

I’m no longer my father’s daughter,
and for that, I’m glad,
but I’m no child of this ground, either,
not even when I gasp
a Hail Mary in the subterranean cathedral.

The brine rejects me,
the arrangement of letters evades me,
the cold the only stranger willing to get close enough
to my ribs and count how many shake with the effort.
Rosary practice transcending the language gutters
between home and here.

Before the ground soured with ash and goldenrod,
Babcia made pickles from Jaja’s garden,
the stacks of cans a horde army against rapture 
and demonic activity.
I swear to god there were too many rules to live by.
How do you keep the body intact
under the weight of 327 meters of earth
and the looming prescriptive verse
for keeping something just as it is forever?
I’ll tell you: you make a new one, 
rib by rib.

Brooke Rempalski (they/she) is an emerging writer in Michigan who scrapbooks together the languages they’ve brought from Appalachia and lowland Scotland. They have been previously published in Fishladder, Fish Barrel Review, and others. They are also the past winner of the Oldenberg Prize for Poetry and the Dyer-Ives Poetry Prize.