Photograph

-Claudia M. Reder

February 22, 2011

My mother’s eyes light up when she recalls her first friend in the United States,

“Zoya.  Zoya’s mother was beautiful—

like Russia—a very elegant woman

who wore long evening gowns.”

As I said,

how to translate these fragments

into a whole

story

when so much materializes

like invisible rain I can’t touch

but know I experienced somewhere

else.

I pause in spacetime

between thought

and thought

imagining mother at the waiting room

at Ellis Island, or

other displaced parents at relocation centers.

In my Alphabet of Worry

the letter ‘M’ stands for ‘mother’

because

in a hospital people often call

out for their mothers.

I fiddle with my neck as if a necklace

hung. What charm would be attached:

a ruble, a silver shtetl, a locket?

I open the locket. Inside

I glimpse an invisible photo of an aunt

I never knew, who died too young.

Here she is at twenty-three, in love, a single

photograph of happiness.

Claudia Reder, author of My Father and Miro and Other Poems (Bright Hill Press, 2001) has been published in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Literary Journal, Poetica, and New Millennium Writings, among others. One poem received first prize in the Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize from Lilith Magazine. She teaches at California State University at Channel Islands, and is working on her next poetry manuscript, Uncertain Earth.

Copyright Claudia M. Reder/The New Vilna Review 2011.