A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
The Antiquarian Wants to Catalogue Her Ghosts
(the Antiquarian is the curator of herself)
She hears them on the mountain: shadows muffled under snow.
They’re speaking Yiddish, a tongue that will always sound like shadows.
Like something and nothing, presence and absence. Sibilance of wind
shoveling ash, guttural of Cossack horses rumbling at night, plosive
breath of a woman hiding in a graveyard while her shtetl is slaughtered.
The catalogue would contain pages spilling with unnamed ghosts.
One name she knows, the great-grandmother she was named for: נחמה.
Nechama—Comfort, Solace—who wrote lost poems
in Yiddish. The Antiquarian wants to alphabetize her ghosts
so others will remember them. She can’t decide which alphabet
to use. It might make all the difference in a graveyard at night:
moving right to left, or moving left to right.
Susan Cohen
Susan Cohen is the author of Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Books, 2022) and two previous collections. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, On the Seawall, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and Verse Daily. Additionally, her work has received the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes. She also translates the poems of Rajzel Zychlinsky from Yiddish. You can find out more at www.susancohen-writer.com.
