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.
For my mother, Felice
by gail newman
Night was the best time
when they were locked in the factory
alone together, two hundred
women and girls.
The lights were turned off,
the windows shuttered,
the whir of machinery silenced,
the workers gone home
to warm houses and meat,
the comfort of tables and beloved faces.
The women huddled together
in the dark on small cots with thin
blankets, arms around each other for comfort.
This world was so unlike the other
where they could walk about
in sunlight, read books, eat chocolate,
where a mother would wake you
and a father sing you good-night.
Where you had a future you could believe in.
All day the hours spun around
like wheelbarrows carrying the dead
through abandoned football fields
where children used to play.
The world was a pile of refuse,
the stink of death outside the windows,
sounds of shouting and thud of bodies
like snakes dropping from branches,
birds singing as if their hearts would break.
My mother was in that room with the women
telling stories, my mother the reader
who remembered every word
and told it and told it until the women
forgot where they were-as they stood
with Scarlet O’Hara at the top of a staircase
clutching their long skirts and whispering
into the shivering night:
I’ll think about it tomorrow.
Come Immigrant
Come as you are: bare-handed, stumbling.
Come like wild geese migrating in winter.
Come in freight cars and in cargo ships. Landlocked. Alone.
Come lonely. Come with courage and pluck.
Come with luck. Come fleeing toward freedom.
With hope. Come broke. Broken.
Come with feather pillows in your arms, weathered, weary.
Come scattered memories, knots
of longing, scarred and sore, battered, bedraggled, bewildered.
Come with your language and your candlesticks.
Come as a testament with praise and honey in your mouth.
Come hungry but smiling, triumphant, intact.
Come with tradition and history, wanderer, immigrant, afflicted, phantom
Come
Gail Newman was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany and raised in a Los Angeles community of Holocaust survivors-family and friends. She is a poet-teacher with California Poets in the Schools and an educator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where she also conducts Alzheimer’s poetry workshops and tours. She and her husband live in San Francisco