First Edition features new 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.
after a recipe by
Mollie Katzen
by zack rogow
Take two potatoes
with their grandparent eyes and skins.
Slice a fistful of beets
till they bleed into the cutting board.
Simmer in chicken broth
the color of Shabbat candlelight.
Chop two onions as the family stories
rush down your cheeks.
Sautée till the onions turn to old glass.
Sprinkle with caraway seeds —
the strokes of Torah scribes.
Peel away layers of cabbage.
Slice two carrots into kopecks.
Sprinkle in salt and vinegar,
flavors of exile.
Mix all together and cook
on the stove’s round torch.
Dollop in some wild honey.
Serve hot off the stove
garnished with dill and sour cream —
evergreen against snow.
Stir till the soup turns
tongue-pink, roots once
hard and tough
now sweet, now tender, now bitter.
Zack Rogow of San Francisco is the author, editor or translator of 20 books or plays. His seventh book of poems, “My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers,” was published by Kattywompus Press. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.
Works may be submitted to fiction editor Ilana DeBare at [email protected] or poetry editor Joan Gelfand at [email protected]. Fiction excerpts may run up to 2,500 words, but only 800 words will appear in the print edition, with the rest appearing online. All prose and poetry published to date can be viewed at jweeklylit.wordpress.com.