When Wounds Don’t Heal by Shelly Blankman (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

When Wounds Don’t Heal
by Shelly Blankman

I remember spending muggy summer afternoons on her porch, slurping fresh, fuzzy peaches, their sweet juices dripping down our chins. We’d giggle as we picked shredded napkins off our sticky fingers. Those were the times Mom laughed—when she could treasure the gentle breath of summer breezes wafting through the lilacs she so loved. We didn’t have many moments like that together—just she and I. The joys of life had been siphoned out of her long before I came along. She mostly lived in a cell of silent anger, and when her words spilled out, they were often like paper cuts—painful and deep.

Mom’s chilling childhood memories had cracked her own mirror of life. She had witnessed her mama day after day scrub the porch while neighbors sneered dirty Jew. Her mama could clean the porch but not wash off the stain of their laughter. She dared not shed tears or show fear. As a child, her mama had been the lone Holocaust survivor in a family of eight. She’d escaped to America knowing no one, learning early that without the armor of family, only silence could keep her safe. Hitler’s roaches had burrowed in every corner of the country. When my mom was told to stand in front of her class to show what a Jew nose looked like, she obeyed. Girls would tease her for having only two dresses, and she said nothing. Once she tried to collect money from a neighbor for the Red Cross. The neighbor snapped Just like a Jew and slammed the door in her face. Wound after wound after wound. And the deepest wound of all—the death of her baby brother because her mama couldn’t afford medical care to save him.

How do you fix a broken mirror? How do you pick up shards of glass without bleeding? In America, Mom and her brothers were raised in abject poverty and still considered rich Jews. Years and years of invisible tears. Shards still slicing open every wound of Mom’s childhood, suctioning the strength she needed to care for her family. How could she survive?

She found comfort in cats. She found love in cats. Toward the end of her life, her brain was scavenged by the scarab beetles of Alzheimer’s. She didn’t even know what a cat was. Her eyes were open, but empty until the day she died.

I never mourned her death. I mourn how she lived.

IMAGE: Lilac branch, digital art by Nadezhda Galimova.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This was probably the most difficult poem I’ve ever written. My mother had a difficult life, and I didn’t realize until my adult years about the impact the Holocaust had on survivors and following generations. I wanted to show her struggles and strengths, and her history was very much a part of that. I wanted to share all that was missing in her life, because she deserved more than that. She didn’t have the voice to tell her story. But I do.

PHOTO: The author (second from left) with her mother and siblings in Baltimore, Maryland (1956).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shelly Blankman lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her husband of 43 years. They have two sons, Richard and Joshua, who live in New York and Texas, respectively. They have filled their empty nest with four rescue cats and a dog. Richard and Joshua surprised Shelly with the publication of her first book of poetry, Pumpkinhead. Her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Open Door Magazine, among other publications

Mother Mud by Anita Lerek (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Mother Mud
by Anita Lerek
Although I wasn’t hungry, I ate and ate, for my mother had told me to eat.

Part 1
You are a tiny fish
trapped in vast dry lands
of hospital stretcher and wires,
face yellowed, undressed,
no lipstick, delicate earrings, or shimmer.
Hoarse winds shudder through you,
remember your performance—

at 24, running away
from the Nazi labour camp.
Black ravens encircle you
pumping their wings as if enemy,
pinpointing you for execution.
A massive weight drops on your feet—
striped fur flesh, gaping mouth,
eyes pierce you. The cat
follows your every move
like the Polish antisemites,
who pursue local Jews,
and blackmail or turn you in.

Fields of mud poked with wires and debris
or soft, glistening ground?
Springtime, you sing to your mother mind,
you are still alive.
A solitary cat, you shelter
in night mountains of rubble,
stalk uncharted tire tracks,
crawling, running, sobbing.
A lone truck doesn’t stop.
Your hunger roars, disabled.
You feel for your mother’s keepsake,
jagged hardness pushes you on.

Part 2
Smoke rises, is this a dream:
a dump site, a tiny wooden shack!
An old man with a long stick
beats a stray cat pleading at his doorstep.
But you—he will seize and cash in,
the prize Jewish fish.
Decisions, decisions. Your hand tries
to read the mother gem sewn inside you.
Song crashes in your belly.
You must come forward.

But I looked and felt pitiful. I started to sort out pieces of cloth, and used them to clean my boots. I was able to make them presentable, and then I straightened my hair and scrubbed the mud off my hands. I wore only my hand-knitted sweater and a skirt, which were still fairly decent-looking. I felt terrible leaving my coat behind, a nest of twigs and mud . . . but it was only a piece of cloth after all.*

Bound, cold,
unable to fix yourself,
you stare up at the drop sky
of hospital tiles inlaid with fish
that seem to leap out of frames,
streaming everywhere.
You swim with the memory
of a wildflower
emerging from mother mud,
a beauty that aches,
petal by petal dying each night,
then pushing to reawaken
above water. Roots destroyed,
the seeds sing on and on,
performing in the landscape
that is who you are.

Bleed of loudspeakers, codes,
screams,
  sorry,
              sorry,
     sorry
You hold still at last.

© 2024, Anita Lerek. Wanda, Mother Mud #1.6

*NOTE: The excerpt and incidents, poetically interpreted by me, come from the privately published memoir of my mother, Wanda Lerek (Hold On To Life, Dear, 1996). A young adult during WWII, Wanda lived to the age of 93, when she passed away on the operating table undergoing heart surgery.

PAINTING: Wildflowers by John Henry Twachtman (1890).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem, “Mother Mud,” doesn’t just describe my mother Wanda’s resilience in the face of genocidal persecution during World War II. It also depicts the power of the mother spirit that, once tapped in ourselves through memory, objects or art, can inspire personal heroism otherwise unimaginable. This is what my mother claimed saved her life, and by entering her story, I am completing my own life.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother Wanda and I, taken on Mother’s Day, May 8, 2011, at a restaurant celebration. She died a month later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors after WWII, Anita Lerek is a memorial candle for her culture and for all others under attack. The visual arts and jazz have been life-long markers. Some sample poetry publication credits include Cultural Daily, Beltway Poetry, Offcourse Literary Journal, One Art Journal of Poetry, Silver Birch Press, and MacQueen’s Quinterly.  Her chapbook, Of History and Being, was published in 2019 .Nominated for Best of the Net in 2022, she cofounded the women’s online poetry group, Change Artists. She lives with her archivist husband in Toronto, Canada. You can find her on Facebook and Instagram.

Walls by Shelly Blankman (LANDMARKS Series)

Walls
by Shelly Blankman

Dedicated to the family of my grandmother, Regina Wallenstein, and the millions slaughtered by the Nazis while the world turned a blind eye.

I’ve walked these halls before,
seen the dimmed faces of those
born to die because they were Juden,
Jews.
Time-tattered images of people
frozen in time, matted on walls
like cheap paper.
Flammable.
Disposable
Eyes of the innocent open.
Eyes of the world shut.
Now I’m left wondering,
in a world once again
infested by
parasites of hate,
if this could ever happen
again.
We cannot forget
those who now live
only on walls.

Previously published in The Ekphrastic Review.

PHOTO: The Tower of Faces — photographs of Holocaust victims — at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Photo by D.S. Dugan, used by permission.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States’ official memorial to the Holocaust. On Nov. 1, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, a prominent author, activist, and Holocaust survivor. Its mandate was to investigate the creation and maintenance of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust and an appropriate annual commemoration to them. On September 27, 1979, the Commission recommended the establishment of a national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington, DC.  Nearly $190 million was raised from private sources for building design, artifact acquisition, and exhibition creation. In October 1988, President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of the building, designed by architect James Ingo Freed. Dedication ceremonies on April 22, 1993 included speeches by U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, and Elie Wiesel. On April 26, 1993, the Museum opened to the general public. Its first visitor was the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

PHOTO: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, with the Washington Monument visible on the right. Photo by Timothy Hursley for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When my family visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC a few years ago, I felt like I was walking in the shadow of my grandmother, whose  parents and siblings had been murdered by the Nazis. They were trapped in a world of hatred, where Jews suffered, were punished, and died for being Jewish. This haunts me even more now, as we see an escalation in this country of anti-Semitism, racism, and every other form of hatred that results in despair and death. I left the museum after about three hours. It has never left me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shelly Blankman and her husband are empty nesters who live in Columbia, Maryland, with their three cat rescues and one dog. They have two sons— Richard, 36, of New York, and Joshua, 34, of San Antonio, Texas. Shelly’s first love has always been poetry, although her career has generally followed the path of public relations/ journalism. Her poetry has been published by First Literary Review, Verse-Virtual,  and The Ekphrastic Review among other publications. Recently, Richard and Joshua surprised her by publishing a book of her poetry, Pumpkinhead, now available on Amazon.

In the Schwarzwald, poem by Lawrence Schimel (Mythic Poetry Series)

In the Schwarzwald
by Lawrence Schimel

They take her brother to break her pride.
Gretel tears splinters from the barracks bed
to still the hunger that gnaws inside.

Through the iron gate, past the words:
Arbeit Macht Frei, she watches guards
throw loaves of bread to the birds.

Not even famine can make barbed wire
seem a candy house she could devour.
The guard tells her: Child, climb into the fire.

Gretel tells the guard: Show me how.
But the witches were not fooled so
easily in the camps at Dachau.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “In the Schwarzwald” is part of a sequence I’m writing, using that same title as the title for the series, using the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as the lens through which to explore the Holocaust, both arising from the same Dark Forests of Germany.

IMAGE: “Hansel and Gretel” by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both English and Spanish and has published over 100 books as author or anthologist, including two poetry chapbooks in English, Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names (both from A Midsummer Night’s Press), and one poetry collection in Spanish, Desayuno en la cama (Egales). He has twice won the Lambda Literary Award (for First Person Queer and PoMoSexual: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality), as well as the Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. His stories and poems have been widely anthologized in The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, The Random House Book of Science Fiction Stories, The Mammoth Book of Fairy Tales, Chicken Soup for the Horse-Lover’s Soul 2, The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, Weird Tales from Shakespeare, and many others. He lives in Madrid, Spain where he works as a Spanish->English translator.

New Release: Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes, poems by Paul Nebenzahl

Silver Birch Press is pleased to announce the May 22, 2014 release of Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes: Poems 2010-2013 by Paul Nebenzahl.

“In this impressive gathering of fifty poems, Nebenzahl discovers long-lost relatives that were displaced from World War II and the Holocaust. In this unearthing, Nebenzahl finds himself questioning his past and present to imagine a new future in elegiac dimensions. These expressions intertwine and mediate language as a process for divinity, humor, and truth. The poetry excavates with humanity the trauma of the unexplained and the mystery of creative response as an authentic gesture from the human hand and heart that is writing.” KAREN FINLEY

“Look for the rainbow fringes. At such bright speculative mind-trip edges in these poems, one finds polka dots and moonbeams, the summer of hate, dad’s whiskey spittle on the lapel of a National Guardsman, poems written on A&P bags, Mingus, ice and madness, Freaky Jerry, red diaperism, fly-or-die panic, and people miraculously wearing love like heaven. The whole book is a dreamarium. In a world of jingles written like lead bullets, Paul Nebenzahl’s poems stand generously to oppose them.” AL FILREIS, Kelly Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, author of Wallace Stevens & the Actual World.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Nebenzahl is a writer, musician, and painter who lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Sleepy Hollow, New York. As a performing multi-instrumentalist, and composer, Paul has created works for film and television, and has performed extensively in theater, stage, and club settings. In 2012, Paul’s poem “Gusen Station” was published in English, Italian and German by the International Committee for Mauthausen and Gusen. His poem “Charles Bukowski” appears in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology (2013) and “Here’s to the Singer of Songs” is featured in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology (2013).

Find Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes: Poems 2010-2013 by Paul Nebenzahl at Amazon.com.

Cover art by Paul Nebenzahl