The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
~John Burroughs (1837 - 1921), The Snow-Walkers

by Anna Kalina

Thunderstorm

The Cloud Moaned,
And cried for lightning-
Then lightning,
Forced itself and
Frightened,
Birds,
Brightened the Mush,
And Zooming,
Strikes the bush-
With Fire ball,
Vast Volume of Love;
Six billions of angels weep
When thunder
Creeps above;
This loud Boom -
Exploded Magic over
Arid gloom;
Such Tragic Measures
Nature,
Avalanching Treasures,
Breast-feeds the ground
Round after Round,
All day
All night
The sound of music jumps around.
Despite the rainy day,
Waves coming on the shore to stay,
And leaving,
They will come once more.
Collapsing in
The Ragged
Rocky
Roar.

by Stanislav Volobuyev

Peaceout, by James Chen

mummy case nose leaf mist-enshrouded paving tile oil-lit
orbit sweeper oxidizing flame ocular spectroscope panel thief moth-eaten

mirror carp Mid-pleistocene olive-clad nut oil
mimosa bark molybdenum steel nutgall oak nimble-pinioned multiple-tuned
one-leaf moon-eyed
olive brown music-stirring Pan-slavonism
milk-and-waterish pad saw paint work nimble-footed never-ended
orange-sized mid-ocean mountain-girdled
nitrogen trioxide orange quit olive nut Neo-hellenic oil-seal
mid-time nerve trunk Mongol-galchic alphabet ocular spot open-spacedness

out-of-season Pagano-christian mis-entry midday flower
pea measle n-ple mullein pink never-dying orphan chamber mino bird money
teller
oil beetle mother tongue nose peg
near-dwelling muga moth nutgall oak mosaic-drawn Moeso-goth
Neo-kantianism pea comb orderly book

Chauncey Scott

A Place Where Grandmas Go

From that special place where
Grandmas go,
comes a faint whiff
of your scent…
clove oil, and flour,
soap, and noodles,
old photos, spice cake,
porcelain dolls, and pixie dust.
As I breathe in your memory,
the ancient clock chimes “one”…
a reminder of the place
you held in my world.
Cheerleader, loudest critic,
teacher, dream weaver,
and safety net…
the measuring gauge for my life.
Someday I’ll go
where Grandmas go…
With Heavenly scents
of clove oil, and flour,
soap, and noodles,
old photos, spice cake,
porcelain dolls, and pixie dust.
With laughter and smiles,
you'll be waiting…
with a hug warm and snug…
welcome and secure…
where I will feel right at home.

Michelle Close Mills

The Autograph Book

      Near the end of my mother's life, we sat in the cluttered bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment, where I was trying to sort through 83 years of her possessions. Amidst sheer nylon stockings from the 1950's still in their original boxes, half-used lipsticks, broken combs and dozens of pairs of dusty shoes, I found a small book covered in tattered brown suede.

     Mom, do you remember this?

     She straightened in her wheelchair.  It's my autograph book from eighth grade, she said. I wondered what had happened to it. I was the class treasurer, she added proudly.

    For the next half hour I forgot my reorganizing chores. Together we turned tinted pages from 1929. A few brown rose petals fluttered down, remnants of her graduation corsage. She had attended Public School 109 on Chester Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Most of her classmates were Jewish, some Eastern European immigrants, others, like my mother, the children of immigrants.

    The first entry was my mother's dedication:

    To all my friends:

I hope indeed that every one
Will fill a page as I have done
And take the trouble and the time
To write their thoughts in prose or rhyme
That I may ever recall
The name of all my friends before.

                                    Esther

    Many of her classmates did respond in rhyme, in lovely slanting script. She chuckled as I read a poem that celebrated the wonders of technology:

May your life be as bright
As Edison's electric light.

and laughed as I read a variation on that theme inspired by the nearby glories of Coney Island:

May your life be as bright
As Luna Park on a Sunday night.

When I read:

I wish you luck
I wish you plenty
I wish you a sweetheart
Before you are twenty.

my mother said, That Emma was so boy crazy. She was married at fifteen and had three babies with three different men by the time she was twenty.

    Her friend Tillie Solomon, offered practical advice:

Bread is soft and so is cheese.
What's a kiss without a squeeze?

Tillie wanted to be an actress. I heard she became the mistress of a rich man in the garment district, my mother said. I saw her once on Fulton Street wearing a mink coat!

"Loving friend Charlotte" wrote:

There's a pretty girl in Albany
There's a pretty girl in Maine
There's a pretty girl at 302 Chester St.
And Esther is her name.

And Lillian "Tootsie" Krawitzky offered:

P L U C K spells "pluck"
Take off the "p"
And what remains
I leave to thee.

    I noticed that a few entries reflected the religious fervor of the Lower East Side:

Courage, Sis, do not stumble,
Though the path be dark as night.
There's a light to guide the humble.
Trust in God! Do what's right!

My mother nodded in agreement, then, to my surprise, joined in as I read:

Work a little, sing a little
Whistle and be gay
Read a little, play a little
Busy every day
Talk a little, laugh a little
Don't forget to pray
Be a bit of merry sunshine
All the blessed day.

    Rose, my mother's niece, who was seven at the time, signed the book three times because she didn't want my mother to have empty pages. One entry read:

If a cat climbs up a tree
Pull its tail and think of me.

    I was puzzled by the page which simply said: "To my Daughter: I wish you all the happiness in the world. Your loving mother."

    I knew my grandmother, Bessie Selikoff, came to New York in 1900 from Minsk, Russia, when she was only thirteen. And I knew she had never learned to write. She could not even sign her name. Then, in the lefthand corner of the page, I saw an "X" with a crooked circle around it. I recognized it as my grandmother's mark.

    There is another peculiar aspect of my mother's autograph book, her father's words of wisdom written in elegant Hebrew, a language she couldn't read. I knew little about Grandpa Louis. I knew he was well-educated, spoke English, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, and that he was "a ladies' tailor."

    For years I wondered why I never saw him, except once when he sat stiffly in an armchair reading The Jewish Forward. Around the time I started sorting through my mother's treasures, I learned from my cousin Rose that he had been a bigamist! In addition to his wife and four daughters in New York City, he had another wife and a son in New Jersey. Though all my older cousins knew about this second family, my mother had always concealed it from me. When I would ask her about remarks I had overheard, whispered in Yiddish, about "that woman," she would deny everything. She would tell me again how each spring her father sewed fine new Passover outfits for his daughters: Eva, Minnie, Sophie, and Esther, my mother.

* * * * *

    My mother had fallen asleep, so I put her autograph book on the night stand next to her bed. Then I began hauling trash bags crammed with worn out clothes down the long corridor filled with the familiar odors from my Brooklyn childhood: chicken soup, cabbage, a hint of cinnamon.

    As I rode the creaking elevator to the basement, I thought about what I knew of her teen years. I knew her life had been forever altered by the Great Depression, which began only a few months after her graduation from eighth grade. I knew she had excelled in English, as I had, and that she had wanted to be a teacher. Instead, she was taken out of high school and went to work in a paper box factory. Cousin Rose told me that my grandfather's son in New Jersey was sent to college, then medical school, and became a prominent physician.

    So my mother clung to prized possessions from long ago-empty perfume bottles, belts whose dresses had long gone, one elegant rhinestone earring from the 1940s.

* * * * *

    At the unveiling of my mother's tombstone in the spring of 2000, I read a few entries from her autograph book, ending with the one from her niece Rose, who at age seventy-seven had forgotten much of her own past:

If a cat climbs up a tree
Pull its tail and think of me.

* * * * *

    Five years later, as I turn the fragile pages of her book, and face the prospect of my own 50th high school reunion, I find the concluding words to her story:

Let me say
Forget-me-not
For surely you
Are ne'er forgot.

Arlene Mandell