This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Newcomers
The only Jews in town, my father’s family
was respected. The churchgoers
in Red Oak, Iowa, considered them
People of the Book they hadn’t read.
Kindergarten was a huge surprise,
a place where everyone spoke
another language and no one
understood my father’s.
By the time a boy on the playground
told him the Jews killed Christ,
my father knew enough English
to ask, “Who’s that?”
I don’t know if his parents, Yiddish
speaking atheists from Odessa, provided
an answer to his question. In 1916,
America was at peace, little boys
in Red Oak could still watch horses
pull a fire engine through the streets, and,
as People of the Book, my grandparents
might have felt safe there from pogroms.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig, The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review, Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
