Meals with Grandma and Grandpa
It is no wonder they clung
to these precise sacraments,
dinners timed not to hunger
but the clock: always at 6,
unchangeable as shabbat,
as the Sh’ma, as the book
of history telling our
people’s sad stories again
and again. Before main meals:
melon in summer, grapefruit
in winter, graceful shadows
of multi-course morsels served
by German maids; china, cloth,
silver—never disposable--
a strict grammar of repast.
Knives had to face politely
in, keeping edges to our
selves, cut flowers centering
us on these rites—vestiges--
Continental elegance
they once knew. Such exquisite
planners, they hadn’t foreseen
this life an ocean away:
outsiders forever working
with their hands to help build the
American Century in whose sunset
I sat. I was instructed
in this order, a novitiate,
my grandfather calling me
to lay the service, wash dishes
as offering, everyone
a part. They spoke English
always; my heart bursts to hear
uvular Rs, to remember
birstdays, jello desserts
said like the color of late-
afternoon sunbeams streaming
on my grandmother, on her
African violets blooming
in rows on the windowsill.
Viewless Wings Podcast--Listen to Lori read this poem here.
It is no wonder they clung
to these precise sacraments,
dinners timed not to hunger
but the clock: always at 6,
unchangeable as shabbat,
as the Sh’ma, as the book
of history telling our
people’s sad stories again
and again. Before main meals:
melon in summer, grapefruit
in winter, graceful shadows
of multi-course morsels served
by German maids; china, cloth,
silver—never disposable--
a strict grammar of repast.
Knives had to face politely
in, keeping edges to our
selves, cut flowers centering
us on these rites—vestiges--
Continental elegance
they once knew. Such exquisite
planners, they hadn’t foreseen
this life an ocean away:
outsiders forever working
with their hands to help build the
American Century in whose sunset
I sat. I was instructed
in this order, a novitiate,
my grandfather calling me
to lay the service, wash dishes
as offering, everyone
a part. They spoke English
always; my heart bursts to hear
uvular Rs, to remember
birstdays, jello desserts
said like the color of late-
afternoon sunbeams streaming
on my grandmother, on her
African violets blooming
in rows on the windowsill.
Viewless Wings Podcast--Listen to Lori read this poem here.
What Handsome Harry Carried in His Wallet for 70 Years
He flashes his welterweight wealth one summer day in the middle of the Depression, a fancy two-tone belt, cinched tight, the earnings of what a good night at the pool hall might bring. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s weedy Tree of Heaven spreads in the background like his family did in Yonkers, American-born brothers and sisters stacked at home like the Jewish seven-layer cakes he loved. His parents and two oldest siblings hid in a secret hole in a chimney during a pogrom, fled Cossacks so he could spend his days lifting weights, shooting pool, telling jokes, dancing with dolls. Trapezius like a shield, lats and deltoids like mountains to be scaled, living marble, a dare to the Italian or Irish toughs on the next blocks who might try to beat him up if he crossed into their territory. He shows this picture to anyone he meets for the next seven decades: his biography, his credit card.
OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, January 4, 2023
He flashes his welterweight wealth one summer day in the middle of the Depression, a fancy two-tone belt, cinched tight, the earnings of what a good night at the pool hall might bring. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s weedy Tree of Heaven spreads in the background like his family did in Yonkers, American-born brothers and sisters stacked at home like the Jewish seven-layer cakes he loved. His parents and two oldest siblings hid in a secret hole in a chimney during a pogrom, fled Cossacks so he could spend his days lifting weights, shooting pool, telling jokes, dancing with dolls. Trapezius like a shield, lats and deltoids like mountains to be scaled, living marble, a dare to the Italian or Irish toughs on the next blocks who might try to beat him up if he crossed into their territory. He shows this picture to anyone he meets for the next seven decades: his biography, his credit card.
OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, January 4, 2023
Cleft
The girl is finally allowed to hold her
accidental baby, sees the small gap.
Unlike others who might have rejected
this absence of perfection, she delights
in being able to protect a small creature
more needy than herself. She decides to love
the black-haired girl, casts her first magic spell
upon her: only she can somehow fit the bottle
into the malformed mouth. She doesn't know yet
her own power, how her magic can transform or curse.
Her love must reach across her own gaps,
the cracks in care she should have gotten
but was denied. She makes her choice:
she will keep this life and the newborn
husband who came with her; this span to be
bridged, this hole in what should be
is no matter. For a time she held me:
we held each other, our arms a bridge
over breaches not of our own making.
Pleiades, Volume 44, Issue 1, Spring 2024
The girl is finally allowed to hold her
accidental baby, sees the small gap.
Unlike others who might have rejected
this absence of perfection, she delights
in being able to protect a small creature
more needy than herself. She decides to love
the black-haired girl, casts her first magic spell
upon her: only she can somehow fit the bottle
into the malformed mouth. She doesn't know yet
her own power, how her magic can transform or curse.
Her love must reach across her own gaps,
the cracks in care she should have gotten
but was denied. She makes her choice:
she will keep this life and the newborn
husband who came with her; this span to be
bridged, this hole in what should be
is no matter. For a time she held me:
we held each other, our arms a bridge
over breaches not of our own making.
Pleiades, Volume 44, Issue 1, Spring 2024
Philatelist
While I was a girl waiting for life
to improve I did what I could, a ladybug
on her back kicking her feet in the air.
Dreaming of flight, I discovered
my mother’s hoarded stamps, unused
hodgepodge of American hope:
Skylab, Credos of the Founding Fathers,
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Exploring the Moon,
Coral Reefs, Emily Dickinson, Collective Bargaining,
Energy Conservation, Robert Frost,
Indian Art, Osteopathic Medicine, Peace Corps,
Apollo-Soyuz, Save Our Water, Peter Max’s
Preserve the Environment, Robert Indiana’s
Love, which was all we needed, e pluribus unum
entreaties to the common good.
Doing what she never would, I organized
each intaglio prayer into an album, protected
by the verdigris majesty of our Lady of Liberty,
the infinite halftone dots within painting
a bigger picture to show me how
my pattern of spots might one day fit.
Broadening, I started to write the world,
sending scarce singles via post for stamps
on approval, something I could do while grounded.
Each month, the universe was delivered:
glassine envelopes opening like blurry windows to full-color
propaganda from the Soviet Bloc and African dictatorships,
perforated portraits of the unknown: Burundi.
Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Fujeira.
The Maldive Islands. Tonga.
Some countries even marketed to the likes of me:
a 3-D moon landing from Ajman, scented flowers
from Bhutan, a peel-off diamond from Sierra Leone.
I could select scenes of the Montreal Olympics,
Japanese landscapes, cat breeds, Mickey Mouse,
gemstones, creatures of the African savannah.
Such power even a 10-year-old had
in her nascent geekery, to buy or reject,
the limited locus of my choices in those years.
I licked countless translucent hinges, fixing
them to sheets in my Ambassador Album,
“For Stamps of the World—Personally Designed by H.E. Harris.”
Providing brief colonialist histories for each country,
a world map on the plasticized back cover,
Mr. Harris taught me all I knew of the planet,
preparing me for when I would no longer be stranded.
He gave my curiosity structure while my mother slept
and shouted her nightmares.
Other children practiced scales or played Little League
for parents shaping their lives like sculptors. With my postage paid,
I carefully opened each colorful window and escaped
into the beguiling worlds then closed to me: page after page
of my meticulously ordered ambition, plans
for how I would right myself and fly away.
Burningword Literary Journal, January 2022
While I was a girl waiting for life
to improve I did what I could, a ladybug
on her back kicking her feet in the air.
Dreaming of flight, I discovered
my mother’s hoarded stamps, unused
hodgepodge of American hope:
Skylab, Credos of the Founding Fathers,
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Exploring the Moon,
Coral Reefs, Emily Dickinson, Collective Bargaining,
Energy Conservation, Robert Frost,
Indian Art, Osteopathic Medicine, Peace Corps,
Apollo-Soyuz, Save Our Water, Peter Max’s
Preserve the Environment, Robert Indiana’s
Love, which was all we needed, e pluribus unum
entreaties to the common good.
Doing what she never would, I organized
each intaglio prayer into an album, protected
by the verdigris majesty of our Lady of Liberty,
the infinite halftone dots within painting
a bigger picture to show me how
my pattern of spots might one day fit.
Broadening, I started to write the world,
sending scarce singles via post for stamps
on approval, something I could do while grounded.
Each month, the universe was delivered:
glassine envelopes opening like blurry windows to full-color
propaganda from the Soviet Bloc and African dictatorships,
perforated portraits of the unknown: Burundi.
Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Fujeira.
The Maldive Islands. Tonga.
Some countries even marketed to the likes of me:
a 3-D moon landing from Ajman, scented flowers
from Bhutan, a peel-off diamond from Sierra Leone.
I could select scenes of the Montreal Olympics,
Japanese landscapes, cat breeds, Mickey Mouse,
gemstones, creatures of the African savannah.
Such power even a 10-year-old had
in her nascent geekery, to buy or reject,
the limited locus of my choices in those years.
I licked countless translucent hinges, fixing
them to sheets in my Ambassador Album,
“For Stamps of the World—Personally Designed by H.E. Harris.”
Providing brief colonialist histories for each country,
a world map on the plasticized back cover,
Mr. Harris taught me all I knew of the planet,
preparing me for when I would no longer be stranded.
He gave my curiosity structure while my mother slept
and shouted her nightmares.
Other children practiced scales or played Little League
for parents shaping their lives like sculptors. With my postage paid,
I carefully opened each colorful window and escaped
into the beguiling worlds then closed to me: page after page
of my meticulously ordered ambition, plans
for how I would right myself and fly away.
Burningword Literary Journal, January 2022
Addition: Arlington, Virginia
1
My house, a witness:
proof of the modesty of another
time’s dreams. A mere thousand square feet
sheltered by brick, steadied with steel
beams, grounded in floors of poured concrete--
wood seeming old-fashioned, soft, in 1940.
“Skyscraper-built,” trumpeted earnest bold italics
describing our development:
the certainty of metal and faith in progress
that captured
the imagination of a world at war,
a world where only metal and concrete could
protect against Depression’s memory
and the half-lives of nightmare years to come.
2
Hope took baby steps in the thick plaster walls:
three tiny bedrooms designed for beds;
closets to hold a Sunday best, a housedress, a uniform;
the bathroom first cousins with an outhouse shack;
a kitchen that needed to fit just the hands
and hours of a woman.
Only the living room commands space--
a disproportionate fifth--
the architecture forcing us to find a way together,
there being no other means of escape.
Even the home’s few luxuries are proletarian:
a screened porch for watching tea roses and fireflies,
two big mullioned windows in every dollhouse room,
a plot of earth—just enough
for Sunday ball—precisely balanced
between communal front and private back.
The houses huddle and take comfort
in the presence of other souls,
their miniature yards making fertile ground
for those just blossoming out of Washington’s walk-ups,
people for whom a crackerbox colonial
seemed draped in imperial yellow satin.
Their lives must have bloomed and
twined over neighbors’ fences,
at the bowling alley or Spanish Ballroom,
on Sunday drives to lakes and cabins,
on the swings at the park,
on chairs so close the room didn’t have to be grand:
canasta doesn’t require a great-room,
just a formica table graced with a cloth and
the desire to play.
3
While making beds for daffodils in my backyard
I once found a penny: 1939.
Maybe it dropped from a mason’s union-issue overalls
as his neat rows instantly converted farmland to exurb.
Maybe it fell from the apron pocket of the lady of the new
homestead while planting a bright yellow tea rose.
Or maybe the builder was a superstitious type
who threw a shiny copper into the new-dug dirt
of each of his houses, a bit of lucky
metal to guard what they would become, a wish.
What would they think of my grand new schemes?
What would they think of my tearing apart the solid rooms?
What would they think of the life
I don’t have enough space to contain?
4
My architects examine the exposed
steel beams in the basement with reverence,
gently smile at the notion
of building something so well for those of modest means,
a waste of love.
I press them with my eager hopes:
Can it be done?
Can we afford to build a palace of our own,
with bathrooms and bedrooms no one will share,
the foyers and fireplaces that will greet and impress,
the grand dining room and kitchen for parties I might give,
space for a chaise in the bedroom,
space for a private universe brought indoors,
space for everything, just in case?
5
Civilizations always build on top of the vanquished culture,
I tell myself in moments of doubt:
the cathedral stuffed into the Moorish arches of Córdoba;
the digs where layered worlds crush each other into the earth.
But at night, I sit on the soon-to-be demolished screened porch,
look at fireflies telegraphing their messages
to the rose that grows up the side of the soon-to-be-enclosed wall
and wonder, what am I adding, what
am I taking away?
Potomac Review, 2003; Written in Arlington anthology, Paycock Press, 2020
1
My house, a witness:
proof of the modesty of another
time’s dreams. A mere thousand square feet
sheltered by brick, steadied with steel
beams, grounded in floors of poured concrete--
wood seeming old-fashioned, soft, in 1940.
“Skyscraper-built,” trumpeted earnest bold italics
describing our development:
the certainty of metal and faith in progress
that captured
the imagination of a world at war,
a world where only metal and concrete could
protect against Depression’s memory
and the half-lives of nightmare years to come.
2
Hope took baby steps in the thick plaster walls:
three tiny bedrooms designed for beds;
closets to hold a Sunday best, a housedress, a uniform;
the bathroom first cousins with an outhouse shack;
a kitchen that needed to fit just the hands
and hours of a woman.
Only the living room commands space--
a disproportionate fifth--
the architecture forcing us to find a way together,
there being no other means of escape.
Even the home’s few luxuries are proletarian:
a screened porch for watching tea roses and fireflies,
two big mullioned windows in every dollhouse room,
a plot of earth—just enough
for Sunday ball—precisely balanced
between communal front and private back.
The houses huddle and take comfort
in the presence of other souls,
their miniature yards making fertile ground
for those just blossoming out of Washington’s walk-ups,
people for whom a crackerbox colonial
seemed draped in imperial yellow satin.
Their lives must have bloomed and
twined over neighbors’ fences,
at the bowling alley or Spanish Ballroom,
on Sunday drives to lakes and cabins,
on the swings at the park,
on chairs so close the room didn’t have to be grand:
canasta doesn’t require a great-room,
just a formica table graced with a cloth and
the desire to play.
3
While making beds for daffodils in my backyard
I once found a penny: 1939.
Maybe it dropped from a mason’s union-issue overalls
as his neat rows instantly converted farmland to exurb.
Maybe it fell from the apron pocket of the lady of the new
homestead while planting a bright yellow tea rose.
Or maybe the builder was a superstitious type
who threw a shiny copper into the new-dug dirt
of each of his houses, a bit of lucky
metal to guard what they would become, a wish.
What would they think of my grand new schemes?
What would they think of my tearing apart the solid rooms?
What would they think of the life
I don’t have enough space to contain?
4
My architects examine the exposed
steel beams in the basement with reverence,
gently smile at the notion
of building something so well for those of modest means,
a waste of love.
I press them with my eager hopes:
Can it be done?
Can we afford to build a palace of our own,
with bathrooms and bedrooms no one will share,
the foyers and fireplaces that will greet and impress,
the grand dining room and kitchen for parties I might give,
space for a chaise in the bedroom,
space for a private universe brought indoors,
space for everything, just in case?
5
Civilizations always build on top of the vanquished culture,
I tell myself in moments of doubt:
the cathedral stuffed into the Moorish arches of Córdoba;
the digs where layered worlds crush each other into the earth.
But at night, I sit on the soon-to-be demolished screened porch,
look at fireflies telegraphing their messages
to the rose that grows up the side of the soon-to-be-enclosed wall
and wonder, what am I adding, what
am I taking away?
Potomac Review, 2003; Written in Arlington anthology, Paycock Press, 2020