These poems are published connected to a project support by the DC Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs. Lori Rottenberg was a participant in the 2026 Jewish Poets retreat supported by the grant.

My Grandmother Sits on Her Front Stoop

What you notice is the petunias: The light and dark profusions of six extravagant planters bursting into a summer day a few years after Armistice, their scent honeying the warm Berlin air. Petunias are annuals, planted only by those with means enough for the disposable; the bold display is both tasteful and showy. Their tendrils soften the home’s imposing facade of beveled limestone blocks and provide a hint to the subdued extravagance within. There are lace curtains, a piano, a German maid. There is a set of plates just for fish; there are horses to ride in the stable; there are potted lemons in an upstairs orangerie. Even though the immigrant family’s fortunes were not yet even 20 years old, the solid home has the air of forever. It says, We belong.

Almost dwarfed by the flowers, a small German-Not-German girl named Margot passes languid hours with a friend and their pampered dachshunds. She is wearing a light-colored rich-girl frock and matching clean, white shoes with a flower tucked behind her ear. There are other photographs of her as she grows, riding horses and bicycles, going to the sea on holiday, posing in fancy dress for hijinks at a costume party—even one of her as a teen, wearing a corsage and a dark satin gown, greeting guests of a forgotten soirée on these same steps, flanked again by extravagant pots of petunias, the blossoms that bloom without end until winter.

She is mostly unwilling to discuss these days with me and shushes my grandfather whenever he tries. But I am allowed to look through her scrapbooks in her living room in Leisure Village East, the precious, unburned memories secreted across the ocean and occasionally annotated in her spiky but loose Sütterlin script, the writing of a once-carefree girl. She is quiet yet has always woven people together as deftly as she sews a tight seam, and I see her boisterous sledding parties leaving tracks in the deep snow of the Grunewald, boating trips whose riders lift their steins and shout Prost! on the Spree. She would label only the what, never the who, so obvious and unforgettable for her were all those faces flowering in the late Berlin sun.

After high school, she doesn’t have to work but wants structure and purpose, stitching and gluing what she thought would be her future at a tony Kaufhaus hat atelier. When she is 21, after being fired for her blood, Margot will leave this place forever to sleep on the hard couch of an aunt in the Bronx and support herself with millinery piecework. Soon after, her family will pull the heavy wood double doors of their three-story manse closed and never return, not even daring to try to sell the beautiful house or the well-polished furniture within; the less they are noticed, the better. Her brothers will come to look for their home when they are old, but the cold land will hold nothing but ghosts and a faceless gray high-rise, not a petunia to be seen.

As if they were never there.

Petunias

No longer a gangly sprout starved for attention, I arrive an adult at your duplex in Leisure Village East, 982 square feet that enlarged my world.

Each childhood summer I escaped entropy in your strict orbit, the only vacations I ever had. I floated with you twice daily in the community pool, ticked through the sundial with your soaps and game shows, swayed with you and the other softly accented bubbes at weekly circle dances, ate through your repertoire of pot roast and baked chicken at 6 each day—consuming all you had to offer.

You gifted me days as well-crafted and even as the stitches of the sweaters you would make for me, row after row of perfectly knitted and purled weeks. I dreamed easily at your house, recovering from a weariness I never knew I had; I let the golden eyes of the African violets in their pools of amethyst and magenta that lined the long sills of your picture windows watch over our orderly days like a constellation of tiny suns instead.

Petunias shimmering with care turn their faces up to greet me at your small entryway—the only bit of America you would ever own—the sweetness of their candy-purple perfume fitting for all I would find within. I compliment the flowers. “Such grateful little things,” you say, as if your hours of watering and deadheading were not the source of their beauty.

I grew up in the center of your eye, even though I was no more promising than a flat of annuals wilting in flimsy black plastic at the grocery store. I cracked concrete with my weedy shoots, sheltered from the sun by as much cooling shadow as a tiny German seamstress could cast.

I could never make my own African violets bloom for long, nor could I ever make my hands copy yours: my stitches were clumsy, uneven, impatient. But that did not mean I did not absorb your every lesson.

As your own darkness approached, I failed you, when you badly needed my tending. But when you could no longer see what you planted in me, I became a mother who knitted and purled love on schedule, handed it out on plates with simple food right on time, buckled it in the car to go floating in the community pool, swayed with it dancing in the kitchen with my daughters.

I will never be done opening my old wounds like blooms now that it’s too late, to show you what a grateful little thing I truly am.

The Macher Convinces the Head of Blue Cross to Pay for My Operations

Hello, this is Sigmund Rottenberg. Again. R-O-T-T—never mind how to spell it! I need to speak with your supervisor. Or his supervisor. Or better yet, your president. I am not going away. I will haunt your phone lines until Hugh Hefner joins the priesthood. I will eat your firstborn. I will fly through the night like Batman to deliver justice. Or maybe you prefer Superman, or Captain America, or Spider-Man, or the Avengers—or any of the other guys we Jews invented that my sons wasted their time reading about in comic books. I am an active member of B’Nai Brith. I know Henry Kissinger. I am descended from the Meir of Rottenberg. First the hospital doesn’t let anyone see my granddaughter for three days after she’s born, and now I read this ridiculous letter saying that you won’t pay for her operations? How can a baby have a preexisting condition? Everyone has a preexisting condition: it’s called mortality; it’s called being human. She was born that way, and she can barely even drink a bottle. Do you want her to die? Are you a Nazi? Only a Nazi withholds health care from children. I have survived the Nazis, and I can survive you. Are you a man, or some kind of no-goodnik who steps on the necks of honest working people everywhere? She only needs another small operation or two! I will call the New York Times and Walter Cronkite and personally expose your outrageous abdication of duty. Do you not speak English? I can carry on this conversation in German, French, Yiddish, or Hebrew. Please decide. I am an American, and I know my rights.

Lori Rottenberg is a writer who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has shared her poetry and flash non-fiction in many journals, anthologies, and even podcasts, most recently in december, Pleiades, and Viewless Wings. She received Honorable Mention in the 2024 Passager Poetry Contest, one of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. Some of her writings about Judaism have appeared in Poetica, Minyan, and the Jewish Writing Project and have been shared nationally on the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness website, https://uuja.org/resources/. She holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to Honors College students.

Featured image Екатерина Борисова, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons