Budding Correspondent

While I wait for the presidential election results,
telling myself this can’t happen twice,
that democracy will be dead, as dead

as my grandfather who sat up straight
at West Hudson Hospital in 1969 and said,
Thought I was gone, eh?

I gathered packages of red construction paper,
went with my father to Hotalings in the city
to buy Pravda, only because my grandfather

came from Minsk, but in my imagined job
as twelve-year-old foreign correspondent,
I could read Cyrillic and extend my arms

as bridge between Old and New Country. How
had Grandpa voted in presidential
elections? Did he vote for Al Smith in 1928?

Being a journalist and understanding Russian
could help me understand him, because
his phlegmy hack made it difficult

to hear him in any language. I didn’t know
then he had Yiddish stuck between his teeth,
had to scrape ancient letters from his tongue.

I made a red scrapbook. Presented to my class.
My grandfather died. I wore plaid to his funeral.

Urban Planning

The houses in Zaromb are drunks in Shmul’s Tavern,
gold teeth glinting against mullioned glass,
sweat pouring pine needles from Leshner Forest.

The streets in Zaromb are broken wagon wheel spokes,
whittled wood laid bare without bark, oh, wait,
there’s a chicken crossing Fama Street looking

for the feeding time when it was called Farbasker Street,
after it was called Yossel’s Street, the continuation
of Moshe the Locksmith’s Street as it passed

the Brok cesspool that once surrounded Zaromb
on three sides. Look at the frogs on the lily pad
among the algae that drowned the mezuzot

until the boxes shot up into the linden trees,
their parchments hanging out to dry
the skin of the homes they once protected.

The marketplace in Zaromb is the OK Corral
that lost its High Noon moment because
the sheriff only had the six-pointed star

but no gun. The well stinks of dried grass
lured from the banks of the Brok and dried
dreams crowbarred from cracked thresholds.

All of this produces a town map, that drawing with pencil nib,
slickened with mouse saliva before the cats crawled in
and buried the mice in kitty litter.

*

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet and historian. She is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). Her work has appeared in more than seventy journals, earning her multiple Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Art and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College.