Lynn Strongin

Elizabeth Pavlov

Benjamin Russell

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Bath

In Japan          old, illiterate men scrub peoples' back with a brush
for a few coins.

During the war
mother bathed us in half the tin kitchen sink, our spines a rosary hitting the faucet

iron cold
set out the window like mist over a kettle.

In the hospital           post-polios (whole families at times)
we were lowered on thick chains by a Hoyer Heist         which tilted above tepid vats
of water gray ponds sunk in the floor.

We had old wooden wheelchairs leftover from the war:
veteran size, rattan backs.
The nurses would be smoking in their station
like Lincoln out of office hours.
I saw us cut as stencils in black, silhouettes, upon white construction paper.

We were fed government surplus.
Burned noodles in the iron cold.

Sparrows take dust baths fanning out their wings and tails pleated.
Inside my memory, in a convex mirror             the calm & geometry of a Vermeer
painting veiling the glow of passion.

When Friday evening comes again, Shabat Shalom (Who has the grace & strength
to pray?)
and it's been 24 / 7 it's old New York, Father home from the office.

I catch the scuttlebutt
the last rose in the sky

I think how much fathers give for their children
and a mother’s work is never done

setting the noodles to boil
gazing up at sky the tint of paraffin

Children some of the loveliest colors—mauves, rose sage, blues—
ever to sink into wet plaster.
Sun      shrift, a ball bearing shine shining thru
         broken loose from a roller skate              still berserk, spinning.

Lynn Strongin, b. NYC (1939), grew up in the artistic environment of a second generation Russian Jewish home with early studies in music. Polio at age 12 left her confined to a wheelchair for life and initiated her into the dark baptism of loneliness, the legacy of all disease. She has always lived at the edge in these senses: being a Jewish child in a Gentile world during World War II, child of divorce, disabled child, then finally emigrating to Canada as an adult she became an expatriate with all the exile and rich imagery and emotion that involved. She has made British Columbia, Canada, her home for the past twenty-seven years. Two PEN grants, one NEA Creative Writing grant, twelve books, most recently the anthology The Sorrow Psalms (University of Iowa Press, June 2006.) She received two Pushcart Prize nominations for poetry this past December and was earlier nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction for a short story in the online journal StorySouth. Her full-length book Short Visiting Hours for Children will be published in early 2007 by Plain View Press, Austin, Texas. It deals with the childhood polio experience detailed in the poem "The Bath."