Purse

by Benjamin Rothstein

--for Shirley Levenson

Her purse hangs heavy like the wattles of a cock.
It is stiff and smooth like a policeman's baton.
Its red leather skin bends beams of incandescent light
as her wrinkled knuckles clutch at its cross-stitched handles.

The elderly jabber and stuff pastries compulsively in their sweater
pockets. The air buzzes like a hive of honey bees as she unzips
her handbag and stuffs it full of macaroons and brownies
and strawberries. They are for her grandkids who love sweet
treats-and even if they won't eat them, there's always the dog.

Kosher smoked lox lies limp on her tongue. The buttery
cream cheese refreshes her palate's memory of the family deli
in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She entered the world there
in a tiny upstairs room where the hum of damp refrigerators
cloaked the contractions of her teenage mother, and Yiddish complaints
escaped her father's lips about the gentile doctor who was too busy to be there.

The gray hair on her lip quivers to a line from a big band tune:
a phrase swung by Basie in 1935 when she wasn't yet
too brittle or ashamed to do the "One O'Clock Jump."

But she was brittle in 1935.

The shelves were stocked with wines and bagels and jars of
pickled Herring; her soft teenaged back was already stiff
from too much bending. She was not a jitney bus, a punk, a rapscallion.
Her hands were too gentle and her dresses too austere.

What do you think your grandma is, a bank? she would
ask us fifty years later as she handed out bills with
the face of Andrew Jackson on the front, the unappreciative
smiles of politicians and greed strung across our faces.
We were as honest as defense attorneys.
We lit up the night sky with matches and cigarettes
and bottles of Jack Daniels. The police could not touch us.
Little Ben took it all in like the news, so that
at some later time he will tell the world about an uncommon
woman who held her head high like a Marine.

But we have to forget Shirley before she becomes real for us.
Yis Gadal V'Yis Gadash Sh'May Rabbah-

Whenever the hymn books open their lips to speak the praises of the Creator,
when the white candles in the sanctuary are lit for those who have passed on,
when the words jump off the pages and dance in the air like Russian ballerinas,
it is then that 1935 comes back like gravity,
the pull of an overstuffed purse on an old woman's shoulder.

The Author

Benjamin Rothstein is a published writer whose poems have appeared in Byzantium, In the Grove, Ship of Fools, and Guerrilla Poetry. He teaches English on the central coast of California and practices judo in his free time. He is neither Swedish nor married to a Swede but is considered by his peers to be an official Scandophile. He lives with his wife and two daughters in a small village seven miles from the sea.