The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
The Aftermath By Rachel Eichler Maron
I lock my-self inside shutters down doors bolted
Stunted breathe tries to get oxygen expand out
Surrounded enclosed isolated shaking
Never again To be hunted Down to be singled Out Never again or so I thought
Two Psalms, of mine By Rachel Eichler Maron
The LORD is my rock, That I bang my head against and my fortress, that I feel crumble around me and my deliverer who lost my address my LORD, my rock, in Him I take refuge, where? my shield, that blocks out the sun and my horn of salvation, please blow my high tower that I can’t seem to climb Praised, I cry, many tears of despair is the LORD, alive and I am saved let’s hope from mine enemies (18:3-4)
My soul also is very frightened, and Thou, O LORD, How long? (6:4) will terror and distrust dominate How long? will the average human suffer How long? will painful holes continue to be borne into families How long? will dread and division reign Too long my soul is very frightened O LORD
Psalms quoted from https://mechon-mamre.org/copy.htm
Rachel Eichler Maron lives in Jerusalem and has raised four children with her Israeli husband of almost 30 years. She has been writing poetry since the age of fourteen and is presently working on her memoirs. Rachel is a Doctor of Optometry who enjoys teaching and working in her private practice.
Featured image in this post: Part & Whole – Old Window Shutter (1) (7813315226), zeevveez, Jerusalem, Israel, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Wanted – Female [Naturalized] by Ellen Sazzman
Her new name adopted on February 28, 1938.
In 1937 Chaya [Yiddish for life, life-affirming] flees Polish pogroms and crosses an ocean to work for her elder brother Morris [previously Moshe] in his dress shop, he who fled Poland earlier knowing no English and even less about dresses.
The siblings speak and do not speak the same languages. The cut-rate shmatte [rag] store hides inside a warren of down- town Cleveland streets west of Public Square and Higbee’s [high-end department store, later recast as Jack’s Casino].
On the one-year anniversary of her arrival, Chaya is informed by Marcia, Cleveland-born salesgirl, that it’s time to take an American name. Chaya hears Arlene Francis host the radio show What’s My Name, sees Arlene’s pretty photo, and takes Arlene’s name.
On the day of her renaming, I have not yet come into being, and Arlene has not yet met my American father to whom she surrenders her surname [Dyszmanski]. For the spring season, Morris rebrands the shop Arlene’s. He orders red velvet dresses [post-Christmas bargain].
Arlene advises he is making a mistake. Morris says he [the man] does business better. Morris buys the heavy gowns [in spite of Cleveland’s humid weather]. But the gamble [plus Lake Erie offshore poker bets] and chain-smoking do Morris in. The store and Morris go under [bankruptcy and lung cancer].
Arlene buries him [Lakeview Cemetery], his stone engraved Moshe/Morris. In the Cleveland Press’ Help Wanted [Female classifieds], Arlene finds a salesgirl job [Martha’s Millinery] where she works until she [I] shows. She lives much longer as Arlene than she ever did as Chaya [until Arlene
Morris Marcia Martha and millinery no longer survive as popular or fashionable].
Mosaic by Ellen Sazzman The Wordle scores she posts on Facebook every day improve significantly as the weeks wear on. I am impressed, knowing of her illness.
And on Instagram: snapshots of her mosaics, intricate designs, stained glass, pastel rainbows molded into a heart, tree of life, peace symbol,
and a hamsa – hand of Miriam – to protect against the evil eye, a promise of good fortune. Good, she looks good, posing with her son,
thinner than she’s ever been. Perhaps if I’d looked closer, I would have noticed the screenshots of her visage were taken a year earlier
before the recent photo printed with her death notice. How did she keep arranging letters and shards of stone into fresh symbols of beauty and hope
as if she could puzzle the pieces together to map the mystery. I carry a tray of assorted pastries to her shiva and pass through her front yard
lush with jeweled birds, flowers, butterflies embedded to weather all seasons. I was not much help to her when she sickened.
She couldn’t go out, couldn’t eat. I couldn’t go over empty-handed. If not food, what was left to offer, to give, to grieve a woman of valor?
S As In Sam by Ellen Sazzman SANDS – the name uder which the reservation has been made at le nouveau French restaurant in D.C. in the 21st century.
S, A, N, D, S: one syllable, easy to spell, a legacy from Father, long gone, who claimed Better not to be identified as Jew.
After crème brulee, clafoutis, chocolats, and cafe, the waiter arrives, his hand outstretched with the check,
trying to guess which of our quartet is MM/Mme Sands. My husband of Protestant extraction shakes his head,
as do our two Catholic dinner companions. I smile, accept the bill and hand it back, pressed to a credit card
stamped with my “maiden” name: Sazzman. S as in Sam, A, Z as in Zebra, Z as in Zebra, M, A, N.
Rhymes with jasmine, jazzman, has-been, but hard to pronounce, to spell, to keep those zzzs and ssss straight, easy to switch, erase.
In 1970, Father secretly sends a typed letter to the Ivy League colleges that reject me and alleges antisemitism.
In 1950, Father’s older brother adds an N to his surname, Sazzmann, more Anglo-Saxon and to the liking of his German war bride.
In 1940, Father’s father, the happy-go-lucky grandfather I only met thrice between his four wives, is listed in the U.S. Census rolls as Gazman –
a spelling error or his scheme to escape the taxman. No chance to ask before he dies. In 1900, Samuel Sazzman is recorded as arriving
at Ellis Island from Romania. Father’s father’s father? He disappears into NYC’s huddled masses, trying to leave no trace of his name,
wretched refuse upon the shore. SAZZMAN – no one stole the name, no one could give it away. Scavenger, I reclaim it for the next reservation.
Ellen Sazzman is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose work has been recently published in Clackamas Review, Slipstream, Dos Gatos Press, Atlanta Review, Folio, Peregrine, Delmarva Review, Sow’s Ear, Lilith, and Common Ground, among others. Her collection The Shomer was a finalist for the Blue Lynx Prize and a semifinalist for the Elixir Antivenom Award and the Codhill Press Award. She was awarded first place in the Dancing Poetry Festival, received an honorable mention in the Ginsberg poetry contest, and was shortlisted for the O’Donoghue Prize. Her debut novel, Wild Irish Yenta, was published this spring.
Featured image in this post: 12 Tribes Mosaic in the Jewish Quarter (9700152548) (2), zeevveez, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
“When I paint space, I am with the astronauts,” —Alma Thomas, visionary artist and painter, 1972
A Japanese billionaire books SpaceX’s starship for a flight around the moon, artists as his crew, and I’m reminded how years before painter Alma Thomas journeyed out there herself. She was Artemis to NASA’s Apollo, correcting their blind spot that limited spaceflights to white flyboys only. Alma in her kitchen studio blasted off from her launchpad, the red, orange and yellow stripes inspired by grainy live TV broadcasts. The moon shimmering in her capsule window as she listened to mix tapes of Ball of Confusion, Blue Danube.
When I think of Alma painting missions not how NASA might sanction with kitschy art, but her abstract fields of indigo, the cislunar distance, it’s her brilliant intensity, freedom. Alma at the cluttered table laying out stars, wind tossing crepe myrtle blossoms against the window as she walks beyond the landing site, leaving boot prints on the dusty terrain. Sunlight, galaxies elsewhere, reflecting off her golden visor.
Alma mapped a way for future, lucky DearMoon artists. This expanse, an alternate perspective opening as the earth receded in streaks akin to Van Gogh’s spiraling night, floating above craters, marias, her stripes, the shadows on this barren surface. Her latest canvases propped against the wall of this sunny, make-do studio sharing space with pots and pans, paint brushes. Alma in her command module gazing upon the verdant backyard. These lights, colors, new planets orbiting new horizons. Small, blue and green. Alma tells everyone—stay on earth if you want. I’m long gone.
A Traveler’s Tale
“Little soul little stray Little drifter” —Hadrian (73-138 CE)
On my worst days I resort to re-watching Cosmos. That old show puts things into perspective for an un- science-y type who’s captivated by Carl Sagan’s rapture in the 70s at twin probes launched boldly going forth. What do I get from Cosmos? Um, that we’re composed of star-stuff, stuck on this spiral arm of the Milky Way. Turns out, I’m a paradoxical optimist, caught by Voyagers plunging past Saturn’s starry clouds, volcanic Io, Titan’s molten skies, methane blue Neptune, its golden disc, its heart stocked with earth’s greatest hits. Our messages in a bottle from this pale blue dot, these two nomads, their tenacity, a future Carl hoped for, in the star fields I travel lying amid the foxglove and wildflower, our obscurity, in all this vastness, that starship, a fool’s errand from that summer of New York blackouts, Son of Sam headlines, KKK rallies in Georgia, Nazis marching in Skokie, Elvis dead— that episode seemed to me, even then, a deliverance, a leap from the inescapable earth, this optimism for our rovers who’ll explore space long after they ceased speaking to us.
That Time Apollo’s Computer Memory Was Handwoven by Women
“NASA was well aware that the success of its flights depended on the fine, accurate motions of these women’s fingers.” —David Mindell, Digital Apollo
In matching blue smocks, the seamstresses pull the wires through the loom’s eyelet hole, bit by bit assembling Apollo guidance computers. It’s about getting the details right. Metal trays, epoxy, pins, solder terminals. For eight weeks sitting in pairs before each module, keeping to that rhythm. These hair-netted experts create little old ladies memory, finding kinship during lunchtime with the astronauts known to visit and rally the troops, to thank them for circuits that help steer the lunar lander, assure a safe splashdown home. This labor doesn’t count as an innovation, or engineering, but it takes skill to read the punch cards, pull the wires, the fates taunt, weaving together, alert for errant stands, for rogue codes might mar these rope memory cores built on time, that work because a woman threads the needle.
James Gurley is the author of two chapbooks, Transformations and Radiant Measures, and the full-length poetry collection Human Cartography, which won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize poetry and was published by Truman State University Press. His poetry has appeared most recently in Measure, Museum of Americana, Poet Lore and Redactions. He has received writing grants from various Washington state artist organizations and currently lives in Seattle.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Form your thinking in lines of two. Let couplets speak their gauzy magic.
Does this form count? No real form but white space, no imposition but a lift of the pen.
I want to form a thought to be delivered in pairs, to show up as a duo, in a form like highway no passing lines,
a painted form I perhaps understand best, controlled and rolling. Not just me, alone, one half of a pair,
but a partnership formed so long ago, formed in struggle and palm tress, in second jobs at a chain restaurant
trips to the beach where we watched planes and waves and pretended we loved being broke and young.
Until it became a moment we did love being broke and young, only a new life had formed by then.
Our formula for success, a form we could pour ourselves into, a solid mold we made to let the ride begin.
Camouflage
Deer step out from behind trees, this slip of woods and me against the bridge waiting, looking, my own kind of hidden. Such blending in, nine of them impossible. This dusty Thursday magic with a hawk dropping off a branch, talons out swoop of razor urgency the wriggling fur something not a secret long enough.
Four Years Into Grief
She wakes alone and hears the lettuce stirring in its seed cups. April flirts with spring but doesn’t commit. The coffee pot, set to four cups now instead of eight kicks on while she waits in bed. This cocoon of cotton sheets and wool doesn’t soften the grief. He should be here, the annoyance of his snoring waking her, the length of her days including his rattly laugh and deep sycamore steps. There across the kitchen, no there in the recliner where he napped. Some days she almost nets him with a length of prickly rope to tie him here at home.
Luck
It doesn’t take a four-leaf clover or maybe it takes many, to weave together days when nothing, no silver
thing worth remembering takes place. I want to be lucky enough to have such stand still hours, to look around and see
each hatching blossom, find my breath in a shallow puddle glazed with sky. How long could I balance in such a mouse trap
instant of stolen grace, numb to hope or the bellowing of a lie. I could slip through the veil of safety, collapse
and let no news rock me back to sleep. I beg for whittled time, hollow and with echo deep enough to reach boredom’s
watermark. Cook, serve, chew, clean repeat. A calendar to hold when chaos thunders near and luck hitchhikes out of state.
Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Northern Virginia. As often as possible she listens to the sounds of a pen on paper and water across rocks. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals including: The American Journal of Poetry, Gargoyle, and The Potomac Review. She has two chapbooks of poetry, “Noticing the Splash,” with BoneWorld Publishing and “Water Shedding” with Finishing Line Press. A collection of her short and flash fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, was published in June 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
There is Only One Story By Yehoshua November (on the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting)
1.
There are always two stories: That of the body, that of the soul, plus the story of Cousin Reva, who, arriving late that morning, was instructed by an officer to wait things out at the nearby public library. I feel guilty about not dying with my friends, she said the next day.
2.
It is October 27, 1988. My friend Robert plays whiffle ball in his backyard abutting Tree of Life Synagogue.
It is October 27, 2018. A stranger passes through unlocked double doors. Blocks away, Robert’s son begins his Bar Mitzvah portion: Abraham inviting angels, wayfarers, into his open tent.
Perhaps, Robert postulates, the soul of my recently deceased father interceded on high, causing the news to be hidden until his grandson had closed the Torah scroll.
And in the afternoon, the scroll is reopened, and we read: And Abraham came to eulogize over Sarah and to cry for her. And according to the hidden story— the one the mystics tell— Abraham represents the soul, and Sarah the body.
3.
Now it is night. Half a block from the apartment where, seventeen years earlier, my wife and I lived when first wed, Jews of Pittsburgh stand in the rain, holding candles. Eleven souls ascend to the region of mystery then swoop down to hover, incandescently, over their former lives.
Away from the cameras and fanfare, eleven bodies are ushered through burial rituals— pottery shards placed over twenty-two eyes, eleven mouths. Water poured to purify physical forms that had, until recently, housed souls whose last act on Earth was to whisper a prayer.
4.
There is only one story, say the mystics: The souls of the Jewish people throughout Jewish history form one larger body.
The body bears more wounds than we want to recall. No one can explain how it limps forward but has not faltered.
Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mikvah in Salem, MA By Yehoshua November
In dreams I walk with you, Roy Orbison crooned from the speakers above the indoor pool, at the Holiday Inn, steam rising as I resurfaced from beneath the chlorine waters of the makeshift mikvah.
If slightly rearranged, the letters in the word tevilah, ritual immersion in a body of water, spell habitul, the self’s dissolution in the face of the Divine.
“He was quiet, self-effacing,” Orbison’s biographers noted. Bathed in spotlight, he hid behind Wayfarer sunglasses and never danced on stage.
To submerge beneath the water, the mystics add, is to return to the Divine womb, the way the soul returns to the Heavens each night as the body dozes.
Claudette— Orbison’s first wife, whom he divorced after her infidelities with the contractor who’d built the couple’s Hendersonville home, and whom he remarried a year later— died in the singer’s arms shortly after her motorcycle collided with a truck pulling onto South Water Avenue.
It was 6AM. I had the mivkah to myself. I heard desperation in the operatic voice that hailed from Vernon,Texas. I was in Salem for a panel on 21st-century devotional poetry.
Like the soul climbing while the body reposes, Orbison’s voice rose higher than the sopranos. In dreams I talk with you. “The lyrics came to me as I slept,” Orbison claimed. “Words I wrote down upon waking.”
Our panel asked what it meant for a contemporary poet to speak to our Father in Heaven in this millennium. Mostly, we do not know.
Two of Orbison’s sons, 6 and 11, died when the Hendersonville home went up in flames. Orbison’s second wife, Barbara, passed away on the 23rd anniversary of the singer’s death.
Once, three thousand years ago, Moses asked God, Who could have made the world any way He wanted, why He’d created suffering.
Moses, whose name means “one drawn from the water,” was the only prophet to speak with God face to face, that is, in a waking state. But he heard only staticky silence— oceanic, wavelike, the crackling of a turntable following a song’s final note.
Yehoshua November is the author of three books of poetry, God’s Optimism (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light (Orison Books, 2024). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Prairie Schooner, VQR, and on NPR and Poetry Unbound. He teaches writing at Rutgers University and Touro College.
The poem, There is Only One Story, was first published in Poetry International. The poem, Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mivkah, was first published published in Vox Populi.
Featured image in this post: Tree Of Life memorials 6, Dmitry Brant, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
