PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Stewart Florsheim

PoetryMagazine.com

Stewart Florsheim
USA

Stewart Florsheim was born in New York City, the son of refugees from Hitler's Germany. He has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Viking Penguin, 1994). Stewart was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His new collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011.

Mother’s Favorite Drawing

I am with her when she sees the drawing
at the gift shop after I drag her through the Met—

a 12-year-old teaching his mother about the great things
in New York besides Ellis Island.

It’s the Käthe Kollwitz of a woman clutching
her child—my mother interrogating the child’s eyes

for something familiar: the shadow of an old man just before
the dreamer awakens, the pattern of a favorite school dress,

the arc of a uniformed arm before it smacks her in the head,
the color of the suitcase her father lifts off the floor.

Mother never buys on impulse but doesn’t hesitate—
she even gets it matted and framed in brass

and we carry it home on the #4 bus, Mother gripping the bar
with one hand, the picture secured between her legs.

Back in our building, the elevator broken as usual,
we carry the picture up four floors

past other apartments also filled with survivors,
walls bare as ours, and before we take off our coats

Mother wants to hang it over her bed in a spot
framed now by the shadow of the fire escape,

the steps and ladder imposed over mother and child
bracing them forever in flight.

This poem appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Issue 45, April, 2008

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