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.
Museum
by maxine chernoff
“the train trains on.” — Ann Lauterbach
Oblivion assured
you take the ramp
that leads to evidence:
a museum is refracted
on a wall with plaques
reading Forgiveness
Mercy Recondite
Witness.
Not memory but
an artifact of longing
random as weather —
how your hand touched
the mirror, you who were
window and cloak
in the long-shadowed
garden, where no one
hung his hat on a branch
or blistered sepia with a face.
We barter our habits, make
questions fill the naked space.
Days are reckless, pages
erased by a trickle of rain.
It is evening and evening again.
Maxine Chernoff chairs the creative writing department at San Francisco State University and edits the journal New American Writing. The author of 14 books of poems, her most recent collection is “Here” (Counterpath Press). She is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in poetry.