Seven years after Auden sat uncertain and afraid in one of the dives on 52nd Street, my great-grandmother arrives, finally, in New York. She was lucky, everyone will say, to have left Germany in time, and to have waited out the war with her husband in Brazil. But on September 1, 1946, she does not…
My mom can tell you stories about all her mother’s sisters. Except for two. One was stillborn. Nameless. The other was Shirley. Shirley, the second to arrive once the family reunited in New York, my great-grandfather having immigrated first. Shirley, who died, the certificate says, on May 7, 1924. Aged thirteen months. Cause of death:…
Older, moonswept no more Lilith saw bed as a place to sleep but sleep abandoned her like the millions of guys she’d had. Every night she tossed and turned with memories of her God-awful sex life— the lovers who woke up terrified dumped her out of the sack mocked her desire. Did a man ever…
Lilith’s face made a face at her in the lighted mirror at the cosmetics counter. Craggy, ravined, parched, that thing above her neck looked like the Sinai Desert. Yesterday militants high on toxic rumors baby killer! man raper! had run her out of town. Again. She needed some ego first aid. New address, new name,…
Old pictures of us on white staircase walls, lined diagonally upward in little wood frames, lecture us on choices we have made since they were taken — we cannot never argue with former selves who weigh less, have more hair, and the gift of youth’s optimism. We can only cover them, as one does mirrors…
It was the slain generation of warrior-poets who, more than any others, captured the brutality and inhumanity of the First World War and cemented in the English imagination a perception of that conflict as pointless and futile. As wave after wave of men were sent to their deaths at the Somme and comrades drowned in…
In the fitting room at Macy’s Eve shimmies into a pair of leopard-print leggings then mocks a dance pose. “OMG! You’re hotter than a habanero in those pants,” gasps Lilith. She slides her finger down Eve’s shapely hip as though striking a match then blows out her finger. Eve can’t believe how good that feels…
my grandmother did not change my grandfather’s greeting, so his voice ripened my sadness before the tone. I considered how he might find contentment knowing we were checking on the short woman he had left to the heavy warmth of lower Florida, how for the children of Israel, it is customary to leave desperate notes…
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