1st Place 

Beehive Inside My Heart

By Harriet Garfinkle 

Deborah, 1999 

The sun was swooning into the arms of the day, and Nathan stood beside me in my childhood home and addressed Mother, not quite meeting her eyes. He wouldn’t meet my eyes either. 

Mother was curled up in the music room window seat. She’d been reading, one leg tucked under her, her filigree of hair shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight, Mozart on the stereo. 

  Nathan’s gaze ping-ponged around the room, chasing the shifting piebald light. Mother fingered her pearls. I stood, a mountain of shame, with the salty taste of sperm lingering in my mouth, despite Listerine. 

At long last, Nathan pushed his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose. “Augusta? Deborah and I — uh, what I intend to say is — we’ve been thinking, or rather — we’ve been planning on getting married.” 

Watching me twist the ruby engagement ring round and round my finger, Mother shot up an eyebrow. “I assume there’s been a marriage proposal?” 

He exhaled and rubbed his fledgling five o-clock shadow, feet splayed awkwardly in a turned-out position, like a ballerina’s. I gave him a nudge on the elbow, and he cleared his throat. 

“Oh, sorry. I’m really quite terrible at this. What I meant to say was — Augusta. Deborah and I are perfect for each other. I respectfully request her hand in marriage.” 

There. He’d done it properly. I could unclench my jaw. 

Now Mother held out her hand toward me. “Is this the engagement ring?” 

I placed my left hand in her warm palm. “Yes, it was Nathan’s grandmother’s. It’s an emerald-cut ruby with diamonds.” 

And the thought came unbidden. It’s flawed. The stone is flawed. Our relationship is flawed. 

Earlier that afternoon, I’d gone to his house. He’d met me in the doorway, his eyes halfway shuttered. Oh, fantastic, I thought, has he been jacking off? 

“Are your parents home?” I asked. 

“No,” he said. “Why?” 

“Let’s go to the basement and play strip poker.” 

“Deborah, what’re you talking about?” He ran his hand over his mouth and chin. 

“You can tie me up.” 

“Oh.” He stepped back, lifted his glasses, and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Deborah, that was so long ago, we were kids. I’d never do that to you now. You’re a queen to me. We’re going to be married.” 

Never? Oh, God, please don’t tell me that. Please don’t tell me Sigmund Freud —that misogynist — actually knew what the hell he was talking about. I had purposefully left off my bra, and now I undid the buttons on my dress to expose my naked breasts. He stood a moment in the harsh light, blinking, then grabbed my upper arms and pulled me inside. Great, this is it. He’s going to throw me to the floor and ravish me. I stood exposed, nipples erect, nipples hard, nipples leaning toward him in the humid air. 

“Nathan, we’re adults. This is okay. Don’t you desire me?” 

“Deborah, I desire you so much, my balls are blue.” He removed his glasses and placed them on the side table. 

Even that was a turn-on. I said, “Let me see.” 

He unzipped his khaki pants, the sound tearing through the foyer, a fingernail scratch on a 78-rpm record. He stood in his tighty-whities, pants around his ankles, rubbing his hands in circles over the bulging cotton ball, massive hands filled with maleness. He shook his head and pulled his underwear down. There it was. My first view of his penis. Any penis. God, it was strange and oddly beautiful, a fat, dark arrow; bald on top with a hairy bush and two pendulous testicles. It was straight and erect and all mine. Take me, Nathan, take me now, take me hard and strong and without question, without thought. Fill me. Consume me. Obliterate me. 

I pulled the dress from my shoulders and let it drop to the floor. We stood, his penis staring at me, me staring at it. Nathan pulled me to him, the rough chambray shirt like sandpaper against my erect nipples. Finally, finally Deborah gets what she wants. 

“Close your eyes,” he said, “I need you to close your eyes.” 

He pressed my shoulders, pushed me to my knees, hard, the wooden floor thumping, a beloved book being slammed shut. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back and groaned, “Suck my dick. Deborah, suck my dick.” 

My eyes flew open, and I tried to pull away. “What? No! Nathan, I’m a virgin, this is not how I want my first time to be.” 

He didn’t hear or he didn’t listen. He pressed my head forward and I put my mouth around him, and the skin ruffled under my tongue. He had a hold of my head with both hands and was forcing it to move at an unnatural tempo. This was wrong. This was all wrong. My mouth was too small, my throat was too small, he was too big, this was not romantic. His legs were skinny and hairy, and he had on those stupid black leather oxfords. This was gritty and ugly. And ordinary. This was that slut, Monica Lewinsky. 

And yet. I swallowed it all. Then I cried. I wailed. “What was that?” 

He wouldn’t look at me. He was getting dressed. “Deborah, I promised my mother you’d be a virgin when we married. She’s looking out for you.” It hit me then. Nathan hates his mother. 

He repeated his refrain, “You’re a queen to me.” 

I hiccupped. “Promise me next time it’ll be different.” I sniveled. I snotted. I wiped my mouth again and again. “Promise me.” 

  “I promise. Next time we’ll be married. It’ll be different.” 

There was no soundtrack playing in my head. 

He finally said, “We’re seeing your mother soon, aren’t we? Let me get Bubbe’s ring.” 

At the wedding on The Vineyard, I had one attendant: Debra, my roommate from 

Wellesley. 

OD — Other Debra — now living in Palo Alto, had come East for the wedding. Debra was from Florida. Cutler Bay. She’d come to Wellesley on a scholarship. She’d wanted to escape all that sunshine, she explained. It was just too depressing. So, what did she end up doing? 

Moving to the sunshine in California. 

At the rehearsal dinner, at the inn on the bluffs, she pushed her brown hair off her face and patted her round, pregnant belly. “I cannot tell you how horny I am. Aaron and I make love every day, and it’s still not enough. We’ve even done it on the kitchen table, with Madonna blasting on the stereo.” She sang, “Like a virgin! Touched for the very first time!” She cupped her now-large breasts and jiggled them up and down in her hands for effect, cocking her head and smiling coquettishly at her husband, who put his hands in his pockets. “This hormonal thing is crazy!” she said. 

I didn’t tell her that I was still a virgin, that Nathan was refraining from violating me, because I didn’t think she’d understand. Oh, hell. I still didn’t understand. Only Giselle understood. Too well. 

“OD, may I?” Nathan asked, running his palms over Debra’s belly, then he kept them there, fingers spread, covering her entire expanse. He stared down as though his eyeglasses had x-ray vision, the fetus visible through the layers of skin and fascia and muscle. Years later, he would stare at his father’s CT scans with the same intensity, at the aberrant homunculus living inside Elliot’s abdominal cavity. 

Aaron and I looked at the floorboards. 

Our wedding day was collapsing in on itself, it was so hot. I wore Mother’s 1950’s sweetheart-necked satin, lace and tulle gown and a halo of blushing baby roses in my hair. 

Nathan packed his gangly frame into a white tuxedo coat. Nathan’s parents, Elliot and Giselle, clucked and chirped and congratulated themselves. Elliot, in a rented tuxedo large enough for his girth, had trimmed his goatee and pulled his gray hair back in a ponytail, an aging folk singer. He was hoping to serenade the happy couple after the nuptials. Giselle was elegant in her pink size four suit, but I noticed that she had stuffed the Filene’s tag up the sleeve. What the heck? It would be just like her to return it after the wedding. I smiled and told her she looked nice. I did not want to make waves with Nathan’s mother. Especially today. Today was my day. 

Mother, in a flowing flowered silk dress, was preening, nervous, fussing with her hair and biting the pearl necklace that Father had given her the day I was born. She kept pacing looking for things to do, playing with my curls or the hem of my dress or smoothing down her skirt. 

“Mother, please, calm down. You’re driving me crazy. Why don’t you go check the place cards? And, please, try to breathe!” 

“Deborah, I just have the feeling I’m forgetting something. Oh, I know! I have a present for you.” She rummaged around in her beaded bag and pulled out a black velvet jewelry box. 

She flipped open the lid to reveal two old-fashioned cushion-cut diamond studs. “These earrings were your Nana’s. I wore them when I married your father.” She got teary-eyed as she placed the diamond earrings from Nana Ruth in my ears. Generation to generation. 

Being Mother, she wanted the day to be perfect, but she saw shades in the shadows that reminded her of Father. I held her hand and patted her downy cheek and told her how much I loved her. She looked back at me with watery eyes. “Darling, you are the light of my life.” 

I never knew Mother to say such a thing before. 

Father insisted on giving the bride away, fluttering around me. “Deborah, you are not having the string quartet play Pachelbel’s Canon in D, are you? That’s so overdone, so tired.” He filed his nails, the sound grating on me, skin being peeled off a dead squirrel. I hummed to myself to drown him out. 

“Deborah, don’t let your mother drink too much. You know how belligerent and angry she can get.” 

I held my hands over my ears and tried to shut him out, but just like Mother’s floaters, Father and his groupies kept reappearing at the corner of my vision, like Jung’s shadows. And I could hear Father’s voice inside my head, rippling notes on a keyboard. “Why don’t you be honest with Nathan?” Ending on high C. 

I was a determined bride; determined to make this work. Who on earth was ever fortunate enough to wed their ideal man? I was being as honest as I could be. 

Nathan and I said our vows in the late-afternoon sunlight on the lawn under a chuppah decorated with white hydrangeas, calla lilies, and wisteria. The day was so humid, so torpid, the frosting dripped right off the cake into a big puddle. The Citron and Grunwald grandchildren ran around with icing on their faces and hands, sucking the lemony sweetness from their fingers. 

Suddenly, the wind shifted and was riddled with a strange, ominous buzzing. —thousands of swarming bees, the air teeming, obscuring the sun. We shrieked, threw up our hands, and ran. Slices of lemon cake went flying. Drinks spilled. We crammed into the screened in porch, panting and laughing and holding each other, hot and sticky and sweet, pressing our noses against the screen. 

“How do they know where to go?” 

“This is so scary!” 

“How many do you think there are? There must be thousands!” Most of us had never seen a swarm of bees. 

The porch smelled of gin and tonics, and I could taste the lemon on my tongue. The swarm hummed like raw nerve endings, like my breakdown. I needed physical contact. I wrapped my arms around Nathan’s chest from behind, burrowing into him. I whispered into his ear, “Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error—that I had a beehive here inside my heart.” 

Nathan whispered back, “Red, what is that?” 

“Antonio Machado. When Father was alive, he used to recite it to me. Because I’m his little bee.” 

He cocked an eyebrow. “Is?” 

“Was. I was.” 

Mother’s hair had come loose from her twist and was bouncing on her shoulders, and even she was laughing. She came up behind me and pressed her body against my back, enveloping both Nathan and me in her arms, giggling. I was encased and protected by love on both sides. A human hive. How happy that made me feel. 

The bees landed on a branch of the magnolia by the house, covering it with their little bee bodies, shaping a long cone. I took all this as an auspicious sign. I couldn’t do anything else. 

 

Harriet Garfinkle’s short fiction has appeared in online journals such as the RiversEdge Journal of the University of Texas and Gris-gris Magazine of Louisiana State University, among others. She appeared as a finalist in a previous Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest from WNBA-SF. 

 

2nd Place

Dark Sea 

By Kimberly Dredger 

“Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.” John D. MacDonald 1965 

  The roar and hush of the ebbing tide was a constant background as the young man stumbled through dark sloughing sand. He slipped, fell, jammed his right hand hard into the undercut. Eons of flood tides had hollowed the cut; boulders and broken tree roots turned it into an obstacle course, difficult to maneuver even in broad daylight. Now, he could see only by starlight and the strange green fluorescence of the breaking waves, each one farther out to his left than the one before. He stood, brushed his sandy, bloody hand on his jeans and pulled up the strap of the backpack.  

  

Long ago he’d stopped wiping the tears from his eyes, stopped blowing his nose. His face was wet, anyway, from the cold humid wind coming off the ocean. Tears and snot were as salty as the seawater blown up from the waves. He bent over, rested both forearms on his knees, and snorted to clear his nose. He scrubbed his face with freezing hands, then tucked them in his armpits for warmth and trudged on.  

  

Knowing the tide patterns as he did, the young man worried he would arrive too late. Time now was a frightening factor. He turned to the wet hard-packed sand near the waves and picked up his pace, gripping the straps of the backpack so he could jog. No reserve of energy remained; forward momentum came from a deep-seated terror of not getting to the cliff on time. He could not make this passage again; no way could he sit in daylight with the backpack and its terrible, sad weight until the next ebb tide. This tide was the one. The strongest pull away from shore. He simply had to be there on time.  

  

It was his school backpack he carried. Hard—hell, impossible—to imagine that just yesterday it held his books and computer. Then, the contents had been heavier, but tonight it seemed to hold the weight of all eternity. It dragged on him, crushing his shoulders. He knew what was inside weighed less than a small sack of apples. Compact, too, bundled completely and carefully in the small blanket. But with every step it gained in density, in mass. In a panic, he used his icy hands to wipe his flowing eyes and nose. He had to forget the contents of his backpack, or he wouldn’t be able to finish the job and this night would never end.  

  

In time, his jogging strides calmed his thoughts. The hush of the waves, the gentle starlight. His soul relaxed as he cleared his brain. This was just a night-time walk on the beach. No job to do. No heavy weight on his shoulders. He could almost remember what it was like to be a normal sixteen-year-old kid. 

  

She was so beautiful, that sweet girl with long flowing blond hair. They’d met at midsummer when the beach blasted with music and fun and kids and sunshine. She was the only girl to ever look at him that way. It made his blood boil then run cold. He knew she knew the very first day they would be together forever, so naturally their day turned into night. Her folks were stoned out of their heads, up at the campground. His mom never cared where the hell he was. The boy and girl slept on the sand together, waking to the sound of gulls screaming overhead. She leaned over him that first morning. Her smiling kiss. Her hair falling on either side of his head. The beginning of forever, she whispered.  

  

And when school started in the fall, she was still his girl.  

She never had one day of sickness, didn’t gain much weight at all. In fact, they had no clue. Her parents, of course, didn’t guess. It was only a month ago she figured out why her jeans were getting tighter, but between the two of them they knew they’d be able to handle it. They’d make it because there was no option—figure things out as time went on—and because they loved each other, they would succeed. Be better parents than they’d ever had. They told no one.  

Yesterday morning when she didn’t come to school, he panicked. Ran to her house. Found her in the bathroom alone, bloody, scared.  

  

So . . .very . . . scared.  

  

The baby came too fast, lived only seconds, with just the two of them ever aware of his existence.  

  

Now, that sad bundle weighed down his backpack. He knew the turn of the tide would be too late, but he was almost there. The waves howled in darkness, pulling back to the west, to the deep ocean, the stars the only witness.  

  

He left the hard-packed sand and stumbled again through tripping softness, then struggled into seagrass on the steep hillside. The sharp, salt-encrusted blades allowed him more leverage, but it was a nightmare of making progress only to slide backward again. Finally, he reached his goal.  

  

The cliff loomed forty feet over the river roaring into the ocean, forty feet over the retreating waves sucking out to deep water. He had not missed the mad last rush of the ebbing tide.  

  

No thought of unwrapping that bundle. He took off the backpack and hugged it close. He kissed where he thought he should, then used one strap as a sling. Once, twice, winding up to get momentum.  

  

And then, he let go.   

 

Kimberly Ellen Dredger is a retired teacher, living in the town of her birth: Missoula, Montana. She is the author of Begin Again, a novel published in April of 2020, which tells the story (partly autobiographical) of a young woman learning to live as a widow.

 

3rd Place

The Silbermans 

By Harriet Garfinkle 

 
 

Phil, Rachel’s father, was not a good-ole-boy from Montgomery, Alabama — he was a Jew-boy from Montgomery. His parents, Chana and Hyman Silberman, were Polaks, which is synonymous with miserable. They were not educated people, and they enjoyed beating their five children with all the gusto of the lower class. Why shouldn’t their newly American children suffer the same way they had suffered, in the old country, 

the way that Jews from anti-Semitic Poland had been made to suffer? 

Despite all this, Phil was a happy child and, despite the fact that Chana and Hyman tried very hard to beat the optimism out of him, nothing they did could destroy his good humor. He was one of four skinny, runny-nosed boys and two buxom, zaftig girls. Phil’s oldest half-sister — twenty years his senior — was also his cousin.  

Talk about biblical. But as for the rest, he was smack dab in the middle of the tribe, where he remained for the rest of his life. Middle class. Middle of the road. Middling accomplishments. 

When Phil was eleven years old, in 1922, Chana and Hyman packed up their wretchedness and transplanted to Oakland, to the golden state, to the land of opportunity. They schlepped their leather valises and their big steamer trunks and their good Noritake china and their fine set of prejudices. They tucked words like niggra safely between their best old-country linens. 

It was years before Rachel learned that her dad had only an eighth-grade education, that punctuation was an enigma to him, that his vocabulary was limited, that Phil’s pedagogy had been at the back of a hand or at the snapping end of a belt. That his parents, Hyman and Chana, could not read, they never learned to read, not even the Yiddish newspaper, that they spoke broken English and their woolen clothes smelled of sauerkraut and pickled herring. That Hyman sold condoms and counterfeit wristwatches beneath the apples and oranges on his cart. 

Phil was not often angry, but when he was, he would mutter into his skinny 

moustache and slide his belt from its loops and crack it on the floor. His wife Sadie, Rachel and Owen’s mother, would hide in her bathroom, on the toilet, and Rachel and Owen would dance and hop and say, “I’m sorry, Dad. Dad, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I promise. I promise, Dad.” But Phil never once struck his children, even in his angriest 

moments. He always ended up looping the belt back onto his pants and saying, “Okay, okay.” 

Phil’s saving grace was dance. Sadie, with her shapely legs in her high heels, and Phil in his white patent leather shoes, loved to foxtrot and to jitterbug. What Phil lacked in verbal dexterity, he made up for on the dance floor, with his loopy grin and quick feet and masterful leading. He would say things like, “Ha cha cha-cha-cha!” Just like Jimmy Durante. 

Sadie and Phil bickered in the same house in Oakland for forty years. Their Redwood Heights neighborhood was brand-spanking new in 1955, when they moved in, when Rachel was three years old. Their steep block of neatly stacked mid-century houses was not quite ticky-tacky and not quite modern. 

But one day, when Rachel was home from college for the summer, in irritation over some small remark — an inconsequential remark, an unnotable remark — Sadie screamed at Rachel, “I don’t give a shit! My father killed himself and look at me, I turned out okay!” 

“Mom, what did you say?” 

“I said my father killed himself — and I turned out just fine!” 

She screamed that while perched on the wobbly toilet seat in her green-and-black bathroom, a Salem cigarette between her fingers, dripping mentholated ash on the tile floor. 

In 1929, Sadie’s older brother Joey, just fourteen-years-old, had gone to their father Herman’s tailor shop, located in the attic of a storefront, to collect him for dinner. He trudged up the stairs, calling, “Papa? Papa? Where are you? What’re you doing? Mama is worried. You’re late for dinner.” And in the dusky light, he spotted his papa’s body, face pale, neck elongated like a Modigliani, swinging from the rafters. 

It was rumored that Papa had accumulated towering gambling debts with the Chinese Tong. He’d clicked one too many mah-jongg tiles in the smoke-filled backroom of the Silver Dragon. Or perhaps he was forlorn over the break-up of his affair with the milliner downstairs. She’d stuck a hatpin in their relationship. Or the stock market crash meant ruin for the family. The reason to this day was unclear, but what was clear was that twelve-year-old Sadie started to hum. Sadie continued to hum for the duration of her 

years. Rachel once asked her why she hummed so much. She replied it was because then she was sure she was alive. 

Phil poured himself a jigger of scotch every day after work. He would hold it to the light, admire it, take a big sniff and then slowly pour the amber liquid into his mouth. 

When he was done, he would wipe his moustache with the back of his hand and exclaim, 

“Ah!” 

Rachel’s dad made a decent middle-class living peddling schmatas with Rachel’s Uncle Joe at their workingmen’s clothing store, Pacific Surplus. They peddled metal-toed boots to clean-shaven PG&E linemen as well as to inked and leathered Hell’s Angels. Their East Oakland store was dusty and disorganized and piled high with 501 Levis and littered with unsavory characters — men like Jonesy the aging platinum-blonde Roller Derby Star and Angelo the California Cheese King. These lowlifes — along with Uncle Joe— staggered back and forth between Pacific Surplus and The Alibi next door, downing Rob Roys and upping the disarray at the store. 

Sadie bit her nails to the quick. “Are you and Joe meshuggeneh? What’s the matter with you? We can’t have a high-level Mafioso like Angelo hanging out in our store. You gotta be nuts to think that’s okay!” 

Phil, as usual, ignored her and poured himself his daily jigger of scotch. When Angelo Marino was arrested for murder, Sadie tore off each cuticle. “Did you read the newspaper? Did you? Huh! I told you Angelo was a capo in the mob! He’s been convicted of murder! What were you thinking?” 

That called for more scotch. 

The Silbermans were the second family on their block to get a color TV — a heavy blonde console arrived with a big blinking eye. The TV would get turned up loud during their fights. Sadie talked at Phil and he tuned in to watch Bonanza and tuned her out and sloshed his tumbler of Dewar’s. 

“Are you going to see that shiksa again?” 

Phil kept his eyes on the tube, “Shhh, I’m trying to find out what’s going on with the Cartwrights.” 

Sadie’s voice got loud and very shrill. “Screw the Cartwrights! I asked you if you were going to see that woman, the blonde. That Candy.” The name dribbled down her chin like spittle. “The one who embroiders bowling shirts? Fer cryin’ out loud, she even embroidered your daughter’s gym uniform! How sick is that? I know you’re seeing her. I know what you’re doing with her — a little needlework!” 

Phil slumped in his chair. “I gave her up.” 

“What?” 

“I said I gave her up. I’m not seeing her. I broke it off with her. I have someone else embroidering the shirts.” He walked over to the TV and turned the volume up. Sadie threw her pink mule slipper at his head. He ducked. 

Phil was an Army veteran, had served in WWII. Thirty-one-year-old Phil had enlisted, wanting to fight for his country, but the Army considered him too old for combat. Nope. Phil did not earn a Purple Heart or liberate Buchenwald. He was a potato peeler. That was his job. He peeled, cooked and served potatoes in Honolulu during the war. Tons of potatoes. That was Phil’s war. 

Phil always thought he needed to make it up to America, not having really served anything besides potatoes. So, he proudly sported the red blazer—laden with emblems and badges and pins — of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. For the Fourth of July, he manned a VFW fireworks booth in San Leandro that hawked sparklers and bottle rockets and smoke bombs. They were completely legal then. For Memorial Day, he peddled little 

plastic VFW buddy poppies. He was appointed to the Military Order of the Cooties, the honorary order of VFW past-presidents, which meant a vest embroidered — not by Candy — with a giant Cootie bug. For Veteran’s Day, Phil and Sadie baked snickerdoodles for picnics at the Livermore VA hospital, but they were disturbed by the returning wounded ‘Nam Vets with their dazed eyes and pot-smoke haze and their missing limbs. These shell-shocked men weren’t like the vets from Phil’s generation. What was the world coming to? Astronauts were landing on the moon. College students, politicians and civil rights leaders were being gunned down. Concertgoers were being knifed to death by Hell’s Angels — Phil’s Hell’s Angels! Protestors had taken to 

the streets and taken over college campuses — in America! Banks who had bankrolled the illegal war were being anonymously bombed to smithereens. American soldiers in Vietnam and Cambodia were raping and massacring civilians — women, children, infants. The Northern Irish were bombing the Brits, the Soviets were invading the Eastern bloc, the Israelis and the Arabs fought a six-day war. The world was on fire. All these images blinked in color on the single eye in the living room. 

The day that Richard Nixon went on TV to resign, Rachel’s father sat slumped in his Barcalounger and cried actual tears. 

Rachel’s parents had done the best they could with their middle-class lives. Sadie and Phil’s days were filled with what passed as happiness, and it wasn’t until the end that they realized that the opportunity for real happiness had slipped by them, skittered away, just out of reach. 

Maybe they thought they didn’t deserve better. And maybe that’s what Rachel thought, also. 

Congratulations to the winners of the Effie Lee Morris contest! Presenting the winners in the Non-Fiction category and their entries below.

1st Place

The Little Beggars

By Maxine Rose Schur

In Katmandu, the motorcycle rental shop was so small, I had to wait my turn on the quiet side street outside. High in this Himalayan kingdom, the late afternoon sun gilt the temple spires and soft-hued the medieval wood buildings. In the burnished air even the wait to rent a motorcycle would have been pleasant, had it not been for the little beggars.

The little beggars were boys ranging in age from about seven to thirteen. Their hair matted, their bodies filthy, their voices harsh, they roamed the dusty streets barefoot and in rags, aimless as a swarm of flies.

Now, as they gathered near us, I looked away. “When a Western person goes East, he goes mad,” an English traveler in India had once told us. “To protect your sanity, look away!”

But I failed to look away soon enough, so I saw that they were taking turns, no, fighting for turns, to swing a desiccated rat by its tail. It seemed the object of their game was to see who could swing it around the fastest. The boys’ delight was great, for the rodent corpse could alternate as a lasso, yo-yo, and softball.

When the boys grew tired of their games, they hurled the rat like a Frisbee across the street.

Then they noticed us.

“MADAM, PLEASE, MONEY, MADAM!”

“PLEASE, I AM POOR, YOU GIVE MONEY!”

Their loud voices were like the poignant barks of harbor seals, crude and futile. As the beggars came close to us, I recoiled at their lousy hair, open sores and rat-stained hands. “NO!” Stephen shouted, shooing them away with his arms. “NO!” I shouted, remembering other travelers’ cautionary words:

You can’t give money to all beggars, so better not give to any.

When you see begging-kids, they’re not really poor; their parents teach them to scam money from tourists.

Give to charities, not individuals.

It’s arrogant for Americans to help beggars in other people’s countries; you’re disrupting another culture’s society.

 

I rented a Honda motorcycle, and early the next morning, we wound our way through the Panchkhal valley. I zipped along a narrow mountain road that wound among deep gorges and snaking rivers. Outcroppings of towering pinnacles covered by cascading creepers loomed above us like gigantic weathered tombstones. I had entered the misty landscape of a Chinese scroll painting.

And it was then I had a revelation.

The Chinese vertical landscapes I had admired for so many years in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, were not, as I had believed, stylized depictions of mountains. No. The artists had painted skinny vine-covered pinnacles because they saw skinny, vine-covered pinnacles. My revelation that sometimes a reality defies pre-conceived notions and turns out to be precisely as it appears, was at that moment both exhilarating and humbling.

On my return to Katmandu, I went for a walk in one of the villages, and it was here I was rushed at by a mangy dog and bitten on the back of my leg. The dog bite forced me to stay in Nepal an extra two weeks so I could receive daily rabies shots. Taking advantage of this extra time, I bicycled through the countryside, ate huge slices of pie every afternoon on Pie Alley, talked to The Living Goddess through the gate of her courtyard, took tea in the home of a Tibetan refugee, fed the monkeys at the gold Syambhumath temple, sitting beneath its four all-seeing eyes.

One afternoon, I was standing in front of one of the medieval temples in Katmandu, watching itinerant performers juggle pots and pans while crossing a rope strung between two poles. I noticed, weaving among the spectators, some boys selling something. The boys had short, combed hair, were dressed in clean shirts and trousers, and wore shoes and socks. The boys wove through the crowd holding large enamel plates covered with muslin tea towels. “Crêpes, Monsieur? Crêpes, Madame?” they asked.

The little beggars.

From talking to other travelers this is what we learned: the very day we arrived in Katmandu, there also arrived two young men from New Caledonia. They were traveling through Nepal, intending to stop no more than a couple of days, for they were intent on trekking. The day they arrived; they noticed the orphan boys begging. The men followed the boys and discovered that they lived on the windswept roof of an abandoned building. The next day the men rented an apartment, and then bribed the boys with food, deloused them, bathed them, and bought them clothes. Discovering the boys had never been to school, the New Caledonians rented another apartment to serve as a classroom.

In the one week I had been sightseeing, the boys turned from beggars to school children. One week. The young men were now giving them daily lessons in reading, writing, and math. They were also teaching the boys how to make crêpes so that they could earn their own money. The men vowed the boys would never beg again.

During the rest of my stay in Katmandu, each time I saw the boys with their steaming plates of homemade crêpes, I marveled at their seemingly enchanted metamorphosis.

Soon, however, we heard that the Nepalese government and the New Caledonians were in a tug-of-war over the boys. The government charged the men with meddling in Nepalese society by teaching the children a useless language: French. The New Caledonians argued that they had also hired teachers to teach the children Nepali and English. But then the government accused the men of committing cultural imperialism by educating beggars above their caste. The men argued that the goal was to find adoptive parents for each one of the boys, and that might happen outside Nepal. The government then branded the men as kidnappers and threatened to deport them. The young men appealed to the U. N. presence in the city for support.

I received my final rabies shot and, on this day, my last one in Nepal, one of the former beggar boys handed us a flyer.

YOU ARE WELCOME TO VISIT OUR SCHOOL

COME EAT DELICIOUS FRENCH CREPES!

8:00 P.M.

That evening I climbed the rickety stairs to the apartment classroom and entered a back-to-school night for orphans. The day had been hot, and the walls still radiated warmth in the small room, where children’s art was everywhere. Math problems were written neatly on the portable blackboard. The boys showed us their artwork. One of the younger boys had drawn an elephant and, in a kind of patchwork design, colored it with every color in the eighty-eight-crayon box. When I admired it, he wrote his name on the picture and gave it to me as a gift. An older boy, who had picked up a good deal of English from travelers, sang a song he had written. The boys sold a lot of crêpes that night.

A year later in New Zealand, I opened the Wellington Post and saw the headline: NOW THEY HAVE A HOME. Beneath the headline was a photo of the boys when they were still beggars. The article accompanying the photo explained that Robert Casola, one of the New Caledonians who had rescued the beggars, was in Wellington raising money for them. The boys were now living in a Jesuit monastery outside Katmandu and learning the restaurant business.

Over the long years I have returned often to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, and when I stand before the sublime Chinese landscape scrolls, my thoughts return to Nepal and that afternoon in the mountains when I realized the truth about these paintings: they represented exactly what the artists saw. They were precisely as they appeared. And I remember too, the little beggars of Katmandu and what should have been apparent to me then: the filthy beggars were children. Precisely as they appeared to two young men.

 

Maxine Rose Schur is an award-winning children’s book author and travel essayist. She also teaches workshops on writing for children and on writing the literary travel essay. 

 

2nd Place

Sleepwalking Home

By Milagros Vela as told to Rita Moran

My early childhood was rather beautiful—and sad at the same time. Life was very good before the civil war, for the freedom we children had to run a bit wild in the weedy ridges above San Salvador. But there was nothing to eat.

Once a month, Mamá would rest. That is, she would tie up a huge bundle of dirty clothing and blankets to wash. There were no facilities at all nearby, so she would bear the laundry on her head to a natural hot spring. Tomasa or one of my other sisters might accompany her, with more bundles of soiled clothes. By the age of four I would follow along, toting a metal basin with two or three sticky black balls of jabon de cuche—laundry soap that Mamá made from pork lard and olive oil, with a bit of dirt tossed in. Each ball of soap weighed about a pound and a half, and you could use it like a rock to scrub the clothes. Even though I was very little I would trail along after them for two and a half miles. We followed a narrow path through dense woods, then picked our way along the edge of a cliff up to the top of a little precipice.

In this isolated place, torrents of scalding water gushed into some rustic troughs, and then plunged far down to the polluted river below. For ten centavos you could rent a trough and spend the whole day there washing clothes. We kids thought there were little fishes hatching in the water—but they were really tadpoles. We’d catch them in our hands and play. There were also dangerous water snakes.

Years later they told me about one day in particular, of which I have no memory at all. Mamá bathed me in the hot water and then clapped me into some baggy underpants. I was a runty, bony little creature. She tossed a scrap of old blanket around me and sat me in the grass to dry amid the damp laundry. Later, when she looked up from her washing, I was gone. Mamá and my sister asked everyone if they’d seen me. People searched everywhere, everywhere—but no one could find me. The place was surrounded by ravines, and they feared I had slipped down into some chasm.

That evening around six-thirty I woke up on the dirt floor of

our sheet-metal champa. Mamá and Tomasa had run all the way home, very worried. My brother Bernardo said I had turned up around two o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been startled to see me and asked, “Where’s Mamá?” But I just nodded off in a corner, wordless. Before she died, Mamá told me, “I don’t know how you found your way home from such an isolated spot, at the age of four!”

I had stumbled home all alone, teetering along the edge of the abyss—barefoot, nearly naked, clinging to my little blanket. When you don’t eat, sometimes you go sleepwalking away.

 

Milagros Vela is the pseudonym of an indomitable Salvadoran woman who grew up neglected and starving on the outskirts of San Salvador, where she survived an abusive family environment, a brutal civil war, and pervasive gang violence. To save their children from gang violence, she and her husband fled with their family to the United States.

 

3rd Place

Communiques From Cancerland 

By Katherine Snyder

This is a work of nonfiction. No characters or incidents have been invented; only the names have been changed. This epistolary sampler—beginning in medias res—is the real goods: these emails kept my friends and family (AKA my posse) informed and entertained with the latest lowdown on my treatment adventures with Tilly the Tumor (a breast cancer), and (not coincidentally), spared me a dozen daily status-update phone calls. I expect eventually—after my last chemo on Halloween 2021—to publish the whole chronicle, soup to nuts, to alert any newly diagnosed breast cancer patient to what is in store for her. If you want the real scoop on breast cancer treatment, read on. But be warned: some of the content is graphic.

July 2, 2020

I’ve been cored

Today was the day of the core needle biopsy, a day full of unpleasant surprises. First of all, today is July 2. Guess when the new year starts for medical residents? Yup, July 1. So, my so-called senior resident had been on the job for exactly one day. As he witnessed me signing the Agreement to let the hospital use my biologic material for science experiments, I asked him how many samples the average biopsy usually took. I requested the modal number. The answer was two. Did he know what he was talking about? Reader, he did not.

Second, the apparatus. I thought it would just be a fat needle taking a larger sample so there was sufficient material to determine all the cancer markers. The larger part was accurate, but the so-called needle was more like the love child of a vegetable peeler and an apple corer, if shot from a crossbow.

I lay on my left side, problem breast uppermost, with a wedge behind my back supporting me, and my arm draped over the wedge to keep it out of the way. I requested that the procedure be done only by attending faculty. So, my resident watched from behind me, and an assistant assisted, under ultrasound guidance.

The weapon…er, corer…comes at the horizontal victim from the side rather than directly above the lump. There is otherwise a danger, given the length of the needle, that they might accidentally puncture my lung. I kid you not. They told me so. The location of the lump was never in doubt, as there is still a bruise from last week, so the doctor told her assistant there was no need to draw a circle around it.

I got several shots of lidocaine, and then it began. Initially all I felt was pressure as the needle made its way through me to my cancer, and then suddenly there was a loud click, and I was impaled by a bolt shot from the needle. Ouch. Imagine a long, fat needle, where the last ¾“was a (lat piece that extended out the end of the barrel of the needle. At the click, a piece of similar length shoots out of the barrel, curved just enough (same curvature as a very narrow vegetable peeler) to meet the (lat side to form almost a cylinder, carving through my lump like an apple corer. This is why it is called a core biopsy. It is withdrawn and my sample placed in some invisible preservative behind me.

Digression: now that the measurements of my cancer have been right sized, I need a new analogy. It is smaller than a golf ball. I looked up which fruit measures not quite 3 cm, and the internet tells me it is a grape, but I rarely see grapes over an inch in diameter. So, visualize, if you will, a jumbo grape. Embedded in a melon the size of a large cantaloupe. It is not much of a 4 stretch to imagine a corer in that context.

The doctor prepared for a second assault. When told the (first one had hurt, she gave me extra lidocaine. This one didn’t hurt, despite the identical, disconcerting mechanical click as the bolt shot home. But wait, what are you doing? Again? Yes. The standard is (five samples. Well, residents are in training to learn.

I draw a veil over the remaining three shots, and move on.

The next step was to shoot a titanium sesame seed into the hole left behind, so someone can track me wherever I go. Well, no, they claim it is so someone can track where the cancer was if it should disappear with treatment.

I had been instructed by Sammy* to apply heavy, prolonged pressure to the site to prevent forming a large bruise. The resident did it for me, then a nurse helped sit me up, to walk me to the next procedure. Wait, what? I’m not done?

*Samantha is a breast surgeon/cancer researcher who has been a dear friend for 53 years, since we were 16. Do the math. My posse all know her and need no introduction.

No, now I need a mammogram to make sure my tracker didn’t get dislodged somehow. So, what about all that pressure to stop the bleeding? Won’t the wormhole just get opened up again from the pressure of the mammogram machine? Yes, indeed. I showed them, and bled all over the machine. One steristrip was not up to the task of keeping me closed up.

So, a doctor was summoned to re-steristrip me, with two this time. Now I had to be cold packed and have my chest bound. Back to the old days before brassieres. It was not an easy process, what with the warmed blanket a kindly nurse had provided me, and my uncooperative breasts, which required two separate, thick, ace-type bandages to hold the cold pack in place and immobilize any moving parts on my chest.

I was sent home with multiple cold packs, gauze, and instructions not to use my right arm for a whole day, or do anything strenuous, or hoist so much as a jug of milk. The puppy has been banished, and I have simply remained horizontal for hours, waiting for my body to recover from the insults it suffered between 9:30 and noon.

There will be no more news for a week.

XO

July 8, 2020

More Bad News

Sorry everyone. No way to sugar coat this. The biopsy results came back as a moderately aggressive, triple negative cancer. These do not have great survival rates. They are unusual in someone of my age.

I will not be having surgery for this type of cancer. I will be meeting with the oncologist next week to determine whether chemo or immunotherapy is the best bet, and whether to be in a trial or not.

Looks like I will be losing my hair sooner than expected…

July 11, 2020

Update – Good News Bad News version

Hi folks.

So, it turns out that Tilly the Tumor is a zebra, not a horse.

Now that Sammy has had a chance to eyeball the actual core biopsy test report, she has had a chance to become completely perplexed by the contradictions, hence stumped about best treatment options:

•Triple negative breast cancer tumors (hereafter known as TNBC) are for young women, but I am old.

•Ordinarily they spread out in (lat sheets of cells, but mine is still trying to build a breast full of tubules.

•Part of what makes them so deadly is that they have such high proliferation, but—good news—mine is relatively pokey.

•The main way they are treated is to kill off the rapidly proliferating cells, but —bad news—mine is relatively pokey, so how can we proceed?

Which explains why the new plan of chemo (irst, surgery later, is now…huh? My surgeon (Dr. Jade) had told me we would be canceling all my appointments with her for next week, in favor of my appointment with the oncologist (Dr. Faith. I kid you not.), but they haven’t been cancelled. I am still 8 meeting with Jade on Monday so she can feel me up for the (irst time, and possibly inject yet another piece of metal into the tumor for better incision location during surgery on Friday, which…who knows. It is still on the schedule.

I won’t know the new new plan until I meet with Dr. Faith Tuesday afternoon. Sammy has explained that we have moved beyond her treatment expertise, into Faith’s world – the realm of oncology expertise for confused tumors. We have to consider and weigh:

A slowly proliferating tumor won’t take up chemo and die, and that may give it time to get mad and more aggressive while we are trying out different types of chemo. It might become more like a regular TNBC while we are trying to (figure out what will kill it before surgery, (so we know what to hit it with afterwards, when we can’t watch the tumor shrinking if we hit on the right chemo). A rapidly proliferating TNBC can sometimes be disappeared completely with chemo. That will not happen with Tilly. But we still don’t want her to start spreading. Conversely, since chemo isn’t likely to be as effective as it ordinarily would be, we could just remove Tilly, but then we wouldn’t know what to hit the remaining cells with after surgery. It is also possible that Tilly has parts that are one kind, and parts that are another kind, but that all the core samples 9 were from just the one area of TNBC.

Apparently, the rare, slowly proliferating TNBC sometimes has Androgen receptors. You know, androgens, the male hormones that make men more manly. It also makes women more…manly.

So now we have to hope that Faith knows of some study for baffling, low proliferating TNBC in old ladies. Stay tuned.

PS. With TNBC, genetic testing is important because it may affect treatment…. I had a roving phlebotomist come to my house on Friday, where we did the deed in the back yard, because Covid-19. Weirdest blood removal ever. Both samples will be used to grow out the cells for genetic sequencing, sort of like wearing a belt and suspenders. But those results won’t come back for two more weeks.

July 13, 2020

The not-much-to-report report

I met with the surgeon today so she could introduce herself to Tilly the Tumor. She really just wanted an excuse to feel me up, because surgery for Friday has been canceled, as well as the procedure I was supposed to have at radiology this afternoon in preparation for surgery. I will be having surgery eventually, because the standard of care is to remove whatever is left after the chemo ends. And then probably do more chemo post-surgery…

…Really, I just had the ordinary disgruntlements of medical checkups: They weigh you after lunch and with all your clothes on, so I weighed fat. They measured me after lunch, rather than in the morning when I am at my tallest, so I measured short. I was 1½” shorter than I have been since I was twelve! And while my blood pressure was good, I have the pulse of a hummingbird. (96 – Hopefully just due to nerves.) Yes, your friend is now a short, fat, hummingbird. With a lumpy breast. More tomorrow…

July 15, 2020

The Big Day (Don’t worry, this one isn’t so bad to read.)

My appointment isn’t for another three hours, but I have already: 1. spoken to the genetics people, who called to tell me that my results are in, but they won’t tell me what they are…

3. debated with Sammy whether I am actually a young Chinese woman, the only population with commonly documented triple negative, low to moderate proliferation tumors.

4. baked and packed a bribe for the doctor—a small pink (for breast cancer) gift bag with cupcakes and cookies, which I have labeled a “preview” of what she will get if she manages to cure me. So, I’d better hope she actually likes them, or I’m doomed.

5. prepared myself as if I were going on an important blind date, for which I have great hopes, albeit with a possibly somewhat conservative person:

I have showered so I won’t smell like dog slobber. Washed my hair so my “date” will see that I care if I lose it. I am even using hair product to control frizz, which I haven’t bothered with since SIP, because why waste it? Now I think, I may soon not have enough hair to use it, so why not use it up?

I have donned a really pretty bra, so—if Dr. Faith even sees it—she will know that I also value my breasts. And, instead of wearing my grubby hospital clothes, I am actually wearing nice pants and sweater, so she will see that I am not just some elderly, schlubby grandma, but a person with some flair, who is not yet ready to pack it all in. I am even wearing earrings, which I have avoided since we brought the puppy home, in the fear that she might eat them in a frenzy of exuberant greeting. Not too fancy, though. Don’t want to give Dr. Faith the wrong idea.

I doubt that any of this will matter, but I have given thought to all of it.

What a colossal waste of time all that prep was. I had forgotten about cancer in the time of coronavirus: Your hair doesn’t look like your hair, because it is compressed by the straps of your mask. Earrings are certainly not visible underneath. The one positive: the holes in my ears won’t close up from disuse. No one sees your bra, because you are naked from the waist up, and wearing the gown opening in front, so everything hangs out. Designer sweater? Balled up hiding my bra, both under my jacket on the counter. No hooks to hang things on. And, by the way, no one gives a shit about all that. You are your disease. That is, if cancer has a sense of humor.

 

Dr. Katie Snyder is a retired psychologist—up for an adventure since her days as one of the first (pioneering) female undergraduates at Yale. During her 40-year career, her extra-curricular adventures included safaris and swimming with whale sharks.

1st Place

Désolée  

By Miera Rao  

 

Désolée mes enfants, mes enfants, désolée 
We’ve decimated your world, we’ve darkened your play  

My unborn innocents, what can I offer thee 
Can I promise you the childhood that once belonged to me  
 

The sunlight has dimmed now, it is golden no more  

Only destruction and disease knocking at your door  

How green will your valley be, in Paradise there’s Hell  

Soon Shasta too will rage, the Pacific will swell  

 

The dazzle of missiles mirrored on poisoned lakes  

Means, more than birthdays you’ll attend more wakes  

Leas of lost lives and severed limbs surround you  

Smells of burnt hair and flesh – a human barbecue  
 

You’ll sing dirges accompanied by the wheeze in your lungs  

And weave cat’s cradles with gizzards you’ve strung 
My darlings, you’ll yet find your frolic that childhood decrees  

Splashing in puddles, red to your knees  

 

In ashy wastelands of gun-toting toddlers and three-legged strays  

You’ll play hide-and-seek in dark coffins and graves 
Désolée mes enfants, my wretched little ones 
The world is upside down, what have we done?  

 

Miera Rao, a writer who loves words of all shapes and fonts, has won awards for her creative non-fiction and poetry. Her short stories have been published by the Sand Hill Review Press, in the award-winning Fault Zone anthology series, and Flash Fiction Magazine.

 

2nd Place

In Sickness and In Health 

By Marilyn J. Dykstra 

 
 

In youth, we hiked up mountain peaks,  

Chased thunderstorms over passes,  

Crossed knife edges and snowy patches,  

Waded icy alpine streams that rush downhill.  

Turning sixty, my knee began to creak and ache  

Then replaced with titanium, plastic, and glue,  

You cooked, cared, and coached me back to health,  

So we could hike through hills of purple lupine.  

But tonight, you lie in bed and wake me up  

To fetch our son to lift you out  

In dead of night to take a piss  

And to your face bring a smile or flinch.  

This morning, I lead you beside creek banks of poppies  

Waiting for thumps from my cane in your hand. 

 

Marilyn J. Dykstra, passionate about walking in nature ever since she walked out the backdoor as a child growing up in the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young adult children. She is currently writing a memoir, To Hell and Back, about her experience hiking with her husband and their dog while her husband suffered a rare heart infection and massive heart failure during the pandemic.

 

3rd Place

Bringer of Life  

With gratitude to Otis Redding and Anastacia-Reneé  

By Yeva Johnson 

 
 

The daughter of these three powerful mothers  

would never lack for adventure. 
It was just about half past nine, 
and they were swimmin’ by the lock of a ray,  

Yemanjá and Octavia Butler’s fledgling herself when  

the azure waters swelled up 
and their female offspring was plopped on the copper  

sand, gasping for breath, crawling and clawing 
her way into the world. 
She was no Athena, 
just the child of the Black 
Venus of Willendorf. 
She was no Athena, crawling 
and clawing her way into 
the world about half past nine 
when she spied Octavia Butler’s 
fledgling flirting at the water’s edge 
with Yemanjá. She was gasping 
for breath, and was so in awe, 
dipping and diving 
her way through the world. 
She was no Athena, 
more like a diasporic African 
water woman on life’s adventure 
and she was the daughter 
of these three powerful mothers. 

 

Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in various literary journals, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence, winner of the 2020 Mostly Water Art & Poetry Splash Contest, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective. 

Hello WNBA-SF members,

Today we are writing to you about our poetry initiative.

In April 2021, we held the WNBA-SF Poetry Mixer with six poet members from our chapter. After this event, a conversation began about expanding and creating seasonal poetry programs to include poets and poetry lovers from all twelve of our Women’s National Book Association Chapters.

This initiative continued in November 2021 as we celebrated Native American Heritage Month with the event Five Poets Read in Honor of Native American Heritage Month.

Our most recent event, which took place this past April, was Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Reading with Jan Beatty and Dana Levin, an event hosted and organized by Iris Jamahl-Dunkle that featured the poets Jan Beatty and Dana Levin as they discussed and celebrated their inspirations.

This coming September, on the 14th, we are excited to be hosting a virtual social justice poetry reading and discussion. Join Joan Gelfand, Judy Juanita, and Andrena Zawinski on Zoom as they read and discuss poetry that seeks change in these troubling times.

After that, in November, we are once again hosting an event to celebrate Native American Heritage Month, featuring a selection of Native American poets who will read their poetry. As of now, the date for this event is to be announced. 

That’s all for now! We wanted to keep in touch over the summer and leave you with some of our winning poems from the 2020 Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest.

Our 2020 selection is below:

1st Place

“The Blues” 

Joan Gelfand

“I think there’s something in the pain of the blues, something deep, that touches something ancient in Jewish DNA.” -Marshall Chess, founder of Chess Records and producer of Chicago blues.

It was news to me that Jews took up the chore of indigo

Dyeing. It was messy, a job in which no noble

Deigned to engage. Fingers, forearms, clothes,

Stained from steaming vats. 

“The stench,” they complained.

And, holding their noses they

Created a tone so rarified women fought for the right to buy.

A logical progression, this blue

Manufactured by Jews who, as you knew,

Never felt at home – and still don’t.

This blue, encoded in the bones, was royal, leaped centuries to David’s harp 

His poems of yearning for God and Jonathan’s forbidden love.

These blues wept and bled, crept along diaspora routes

All the way to Dylan. Today, we mourn Pittsburgh Jews.

The same hands that mixed indigo, lent a hand to suffering wanderers, immigrants, 

The displaced, murdered. They recalled their own treacherous crossings. 

The blues. The Shoah. Dachau, Pittsburgh.

Indigo, David, bloodlines. Lines of blood

And still, an outstretched arm, an open hand.

 

2nd Place

“Seoraksan”

Lucille Lang Day

On a clear day from the top of Mt. Seorak,   

which juts more than a mile into the sky,

you can see all the way to North Korea,

but Google won’t tell you exactly,

or even roughly, how far that is. 

 

Sorry, your search appears to be 

outside our current coverage area.

A polite way of saying, You can’t get

there from here. Our guide says 

it’s 40 kilometers, about 25 miles.

 

Korea is seventy percent mountains

with forests of oak and red pine. 

Intricately carved and painted, 

Sinheungsa at the base of Mt. Seorak

is the oldest Zen temple in the world.

 

Nearby sits the Great Unification Buddha,

48-feet high, representing the people’s

wish for reunification of Korea,

but the guide will lose his job if he speaks 

of this. No politics, his employer 

 

has warned. It might upset the tourists.

So he turns to religion. Half of Koreans

are atheists, one-quarter Christians.

Inside the hollow statue are three pieces

of Buddha’s sari. Monks chant and pray.

 

3rd Place

Pivot 

Joan Gelfand

Navigating traffic, corner of Vaci and Vorosmarty Square.

Soviet brutalist office faces off with a gothic cathedral.

Sweet smell of potato pancakes, brisket and a riot of pastries

Tempt passersby with big eyes and thin wallets. 

We tangle of tourists, busking musicians and locals,

Traverse busy Pest. Across the river we rumble

To meet the funicular to bucolic Buda. 

 

I step from the yellow tram, 

My hand, clutching the guardrail.

Concern passes Simone’s face. 

A cloud over sun.

 

My studied descent on the steep step

Signals a change in the atmosphere. 

I watch my daughter silently calculate extra minutes

To reach our concert seats at Zeneakadamia.

 

Like a whisper, she pivots

Acquiescing to relinquish her role:

Child. Recipient of great and generous love, 

The one protected.

 

An imperceptible half-turn,

A new vocabulary of care.

Her arm laced through mine,

She extends her hand, her

Strength, to steady me.