First Snow
It snowed last night
the first
dusting of the season
a fine
powder, the thrill
of school
being cancelled
skating on
frozen asphalt
hurling
snowballs, dodging them
on closed
off city streets.
My
mother’s wretched hot chocolate,
store bought
and watery,
the thrill
of marshmallows
melting
into a froth on top.
I’m long
past the age,
still the
feeling returns,
the years melt
into a froth.
I am forever
young
reborn at
this --
first
white light.
R.I.P
When I asked my older brother,
valedictorian
of his kindergarten class
(our
immigrant grandmother hung
the
newspaper clipping on her fridge)
and later
valedictorian of our high school,
who was
the smartest person
he knew he
said Ezra S——.
Handsome
in a craggy way,
Black, curly
hair —
beaked
nose chiselled
out of his
pale, smooth
soft flesh
—
he went to
Caltech but
not to Los
Alamos
not to
solve Fermat’s Last theorem
he
practiced herbal medicine instead,
new and
intriguing in ’78.
He played
piano in a jazz trio,
married the
painter, the intense Lady S.,
lived
apart in a forgettable town.
He
distrusted business
so when he
was diagnosed
with skin
cancer, too late —
he googled
do it yourself
and built
his own coffin.
When I
told my older brother,
he laughed,
the sound of sorrow.
That’s so
Ezra, he said.
Market
Hill Road
In a house on a ridge
in a town
in the country
where my
aunt and uncle
lived
across the street
from a
barn — a sign said
Leonard’s
Eggs — a window
looked
into another and
through
that other showed
sky —
nothing else.
In it, I
saw everything.
In a
different town at the end
of a
different street loomed
the Rocky
Mountains — all of them.
In summer,
sun shone off
their hazy
peaks; in winter,
white
rivulets of melting ice
dripped
down their massive flanks.
The
mountains calmed me,
whispered
wait. I was lonely.
They were
my everything.
In this last town — maybe —-
a mess of
dogs and people
pushing
pedals, strollers,
stoops and
brownstones,
leafy
branches through
which
sometimes show sky,
I see my
old town, the triggering town —
where the
subway carried me
out of
childhood and into Manhattan.
I was
never lonely there.
In the
faces of strangers
I saw
everything.
Parade
So it’s Thanksgiving a year later
our first
without you,
without
each other.
With you
gone, we scatter
like
jewels on a necklace
the clasp
unsprung.
We’re everywhere
and
nowhere
— without
you.
So it’s
Thanksgiving a year ago
the
hospital windows dark
but for
the twinkling
of holiday
traffic below.
Your lungs
drowning in fluid
the night
full of black holes
The nurse
gives you laudanum
mercy
killing — something
for which
to give thanks.
So it’s
Thanksgiving, 1958
We stand
on soda crates
to better
see the parade
Tom Thumb,
Sinbad,
Atlas
holding up the world.
Afterward,
we sip hot chocolate,
the wool
of your coat
warming
our frozen cheeks.
We're
bound by our love for you
your love
for us --
forever,
even scattered --
for this
we give thanks.
Fran R. Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She won a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and in 2021, a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. In 2022, her poem, Memento Mori, was a winner of the Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate’s 2022 Contest. Her Chapbook, Weight, was the first runner up in the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, and was published in 2022 by Choeofpleirn Press. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political science at college but wishes she had spent more time studying Keats.
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