15 Sep Fish Fry Daughter Returns by Sara Ries Dziekonski
I was born on a Fish Fry Friday
in November’s icy grip.
When the call came, my father stayed
at the Holiday Inn kitchen
to fry fish for a party of seventeen.
He made my arrival
with seconds to spare.
When all the platters were packed with fish
coleslaw, mac salad, tartar and lemon,
my father threw off his apron,
hopped in his piece of junk Chevy Vega.
That was the last time it started,
its next stop: bones in the junkyard.
I’m sure he noted the moon,
how it must have hung heavy in the sky.
He’d curse slowpoke drivers
all the way to Mercy Hospital,
where he’d say thank you at least twice
to the nurse who directed him to the room,
told him, Get there—right away.
Maybe you’ve heard the poem that ends
with the hope my father held me
in haddock-scented hands,
apron over his black pants sprinkled with flour
forehead oily from standing over the deep fryer
telling the fish to hurry, hurry—
Here’s another ending:
I arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped
around my neck, my first necklace:
miracle baby, the doctor said.
I was born from the pull of my mother’s longing,
the stretch of time where my mother laid in a hospital bed,
gown sticking to her skin, her hair a tangle of golden leaves,
nurses asking, Where’s your husband?
When my father finally got there
my mother said, What took so long?
not to him, black hat coated with grease,
but to me.
About the Poet
Sara Ries Dziekonski is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first full-length collection of poems Come In, We’re Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition and was published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Press in 2010. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Marrying Maracuyá, which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition and was published by Main Street Rag in 2021. This poem appears in her new full-length collection Today’s Specials, which was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award and published in September of 2024 as its Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection.
Her poems have appeared in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and in the journals Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and the anthology LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others.
For several decades, Sara’s mother and father owned and operated the Woodlawn Diner on Lake Shore Road (Rt. 5) in Blasdell, NY, a popular working-class dining spot for Buffalo factory workers and truckers before and after their shifts. Ries Dziekonski worked at the diner in her late teens and college years, and it serves as a backdrop for many of her poems. After receiving the Best MFA Thesis in Poetry Award at Chatham University in 2009 and a period of teaching ESL in South America, she returned home to create and host the much beloved Poetry and Dinner Night at the Woodlawn Diner Series, which for nearly a decade became one of the hottest tickets on the Buffalo poetry scene.
Ries Dziekonski now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her husband, two children, and a cat. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and teaches creative writing for the nonprofit literary organization Keep St. Pete Lit.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.