First Edition features original works by Northern California Jewish writers. Appearing the first issue of each month, it includes a poem and an excerpt from a novel or short story.
The Lady’s Torch
by deborah grossman
Grass ages toward scruff,
potatoes burrow deep in earth,
fall fades to winter.
Over the muddy road Russian soldiers
slosh along, stare at Pauline’s soft curves
silhouetted beneath her ragged sweater.
Hurrying home from Bubbie Kuneh’s,
she feels their eyes burn her back.
They whistle, pinch her ass,
push her against the leafless shrub.
After Shabbat, she packs her paper-thin suitcase,
kisses her mother farewell and turns toward distant port.
Pressed against her breast,
a small photo of a curly haired man,
who, her cousin says,
knows jokes like the ones we told
before the soldiers drained
our skating pond.
Ahead, the ship looms in evening’s shadow.
Pauline descends to steerage,
sleeps with barrels of herring
crates of rotting potatoes
and mice, many, many mice.
For weeks on end, bitter winds
roil waves rocking back and forth
until pre-dawn when a woman beckons,
come see, she says, an island, you can see.
She struggles awake, weak from rehearsing strokes
she’ll never rub into her mother’s stooped shoulders,
her mother, who churned sweet butter late into night.
Sleepwalking with a photographic dream,
she stumbles up wooden ladders.
Wide-eyed, she watches buildings
strung along windy coasts
like a clothesline of giant villages.
She waits to disembark
under shadows of an outstretched arm.
Deborah Grossman was the poet laureate of the City of Pleasanton from 2009 to 2011. She is the author of “Goldie and Me,” a book about family, friendship and freedom through the lens of poetry. She has won many regional poetry awards and has been published in The Gathering and the Las Positas Anthology. Grossman is a board member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, a Bay Area group that supports poetry and the literary arts.