Issue Twenty-Seven - Winter 2016

The Russian Woman

By Naomi Lowinsky

“The Russian woman’s daughter is sweeping the floor,” you announce, hauling yourself out of chemo’s last slime before slipping back down into undertow. In dreams you are forever traveling—driving near cliff’s edge, navigating bus stops, running to catch a plane. Perhaps you’re at a wedding in the Old Country, where our dead have gathered to bless the unknown bride, the unseen groom.

Surely there’s a grandmother who’ll make you a big bowl of borscht—red root broth to purge you of aches, shakes, nasty aggravations in delicate places. Surely they’ll be gone like the crumbs swept away by the Russian woman’s daughter. Perhaps it’s her wedding. And the groom—I can see him now—dancing in the glow of those who came before, aroused as the Green Man in May.

Here, in the Old Country of the Heart, you are my root and my canopy. Here, in the garden, the earth’s been turned, the seedlings planted. Come back to the river with me. Come back to the farmer’s market. Strawberries sing the sun’s hot tongue. A fiddler frolics a Klezmer tune. Our dead do a circle dance around us—throw us high to the canopy sky.

Copyright Lowinsky 2016

Naomi Lowinsky 's poem “Madelyn Dunham, Passing On” won first prize in the Obama Millennium Contest. She also won the Blue Light Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lowinsky's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Argestes, Backwards City Review, Barely South Review, Blue Lake Review, Bogg, Cadillac Cicatrix, California Quarterly, The Cape Rock, Caveat Lector, The Chaffin Journal, Circle Show, Compass Rose, Comstock Review, Crack the Spine, Darkling, decomP, Dogwood Review, Earth’s Daughters, Eclipse, ellipsis…literature and art, Emprise Review, Euphony, Fourth River, Freshwater, G.W. Review,Ginosko, Ibbetson Street Press, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Left Curve, Lindenwood Review, Meridian Anthology Of Contemporary Poetry, Minetta Review, Monkeybicycle, Nassau Review, The Penmen Review, The Pinch, Poem, Prick of the Spindle, Quiddity, Rattle, Reed Magazine, Runes, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, Serving House Journal, Ship of Fools, Sierra Nevada Review, Soundings East, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Stand, Stickman Review, The Texas Review, Tightrope, Verdad, Visions International, Weber Studies, Westview, Whistling Shade, West Trestle Review, Wild Violet, Willow Review, and in the anthologies Child Of My Child, When the Muse Calls, and The Book of Now. Her fourth poetry collection is called The Faust Woman Poems. Lewinsky is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Berkeley, CA and the poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, which is published by the Los Angeles Jung Institute.

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