"I Dream of My Grandmother's Piggies" by Chrissy Stegman

Boris Yeltsin and I sit across from each other, the table between us crowded with bowls of

borscht. White tablecloth. My dead grandmother is there too, back from the afterlife to haunt my dream with the precision of a grandmother’s visit, polite, yes, but with intent. She’s resplendent in pink, wearing her Sunday best, her silver hair adorned with her good hat. She frowns when she sees Boris. I was hoping for Reagan, she says, her voice heavy with disappointment, but Reagan’s busy in some celestial debate club or another, defending Jelly Belly from St. Peter, I imagine.

I brought these, she says, reaching into her pocket and pulling out two flavors of Jelly Bellies. Blueberry. Buttered popcorn. Colors as vivid and distressed as the Ukrainian flag. But those are your favorites, not mine, she points out. I shrug. What can I say? We’re from Krakow, we have no flag, just borrowed flavors, borrowed identities, borrowed countries. You're wrong, she says.

Boris leans in, asks her for the gołąbki recipe. She responds with a stare—her eyes steely and glittering like the memory of snow. It’s not just a refusal, it’s a verdict. Boris shrinks, or maybe I imagine that. An unexpected rage flares in me, burning hot, reckless. Coward, I think.

He looks at me, breaking the fourth wall, like he’s in on a joke, one I am just beginning to understand. You were the only bluebird in her chinoise wallpaper, he tells me, and suddenly it’s too much, all of it. I want to tell him I don’t care. I want to tell him I don’t care about this dream or this scene or the way his name trips over my fingers every time I try to spell it out, Yeltsin, each typo a kind of invocation, each correction an exorcism. But it’s like trying to paint a memory, and you’ve blurred out the nucleus and are left with the lapis lazuli of an empty middle.

I got my MFA through my father’s alcoholism, I blurt out instead. And then it’s all crumbling, everything—the dream, the conversation, the borscht that’s been sitting untouched. Boris Yeltsin, zeitgeist poltergeist of my childhood, the face I remember from years of watching TV with my grandparents, is crumbling.

I Google him in the early morning dark, the glow of the screen illuminating his last year in power. It’s the same year my grandmother died. I don’t know what that means, but it feels like it should mean something.

Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Recent work has appeared in/forthcoming: Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, The Voidspace, The Madrigal, 5 Minutes, Ucity Review, and BULL. She is a BOTN nominee.