This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from My Family Was Like a Russian Novel by Carla Sarett (Plan B Press 2023).
Tiny Grandmothers
Dante ascended to his Beatrice.
I prefer my version of heaven.
We all do, I suppose.
I can’t have too many tiny grandmothers
in mine. A sweet multitude
of heavy coats and velvet hats.
Always waving from Fort Tryon’s
shadows, they’re weighed down
by loaves of dark bread and butter.
Their pocketbooks filled with silver-
wrapped Hershey’s kisses, rolls of cherry
red Lifesavers, they never forget.
I take their wrinkled kitchen hands.
We form a perfect circle. We wheel around
again and again and again.
We say the names of every murdered sister.
Those names, they move the sun.
Carla Sarett is a poet and novelist based in San Francisco. Her poetry books include She Has Visions (Main Street Rag Press, 2022) and two chapbooks, Woman on the Run (Alien Buddha Press, 2023) and My Family Was Like a Russian Novel (Plan B Press, 2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of Net and Best American Essays. Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania.
