Poem of the Week, by Robyn Sarah
Last week I visited The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My grandfather and his family lived there when they first emigrated to New York, after fleeing the pogroms in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Small dark rooms. No electricity. No running water. Four toilets in the back yard for the entire building. Family piecework factories. One of my great-uncles died of TB, which he contracted in a sweatshop. No, scratch that. He died of suicide because he didn’t want to put his family through the pain and expense of a long and agonizing death.
On our tour, I was the only American. When the tour guide asked if there had once been languages spoken in our families that are no longer spoken, I was the only one to raise my hand: “Sure. Russian, Yiddish, German, Danish, French.” My ancestors lived not an American dream but an American story, like most of us. It was a relief to emerge from that dark, cramped tenement and stand in the sunshine.
On Closing the Apartment of My Grandparents of Blessed Memory, by Robyn Sarah
And then I stood for the last time in that room.
The key was in my hand. I held my ground,
and listened to the quiet that was like a sound,
and saw how the long sun of winter afternoon
fell slantwise on the floorboards, making bloom
the grain in the blond wood. (All that they owned
was once contained here.) At the window moaned
a splinter of wind. I would be going soon.
I would be going soon; but first I stood,
hearing the years turn in that emptied place
whose fullness echoed. Whose familiar smell,
of a tranquil life, lived simply, clung like a mood
or a long-loved melody there. A lingering grace.
Then I locked up, and rang the janitor’s bell.
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I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love, / you won’t be able to see beyond it. 
What wearies you? What renews you? Who brings you joy? Who exhausts you? When you think of safety and comfort and happiness, what place or person comes to mind? The answers to these questions are already known to you. They live in your body, in a place beyond conscious thought and its dangerous companions, rationalization and overriding. 
Five years ago this week my older daughter and I were sitting on the porch of a cafe in Istanbul, smoking a hookah and eating mezes and pita bread. Later, we walked the streets of our neighborhood, which was on the Bosphorus. At one point the muezzins began their call to prayer, the sound of their voices wafting over the stone walls and cobblestones of that vast and sprawling city. The sun was falling below the horizon and my daughter was walking ahead of me, her tumble of dark curls falling over her navy jacket, and my heart seized up in a familiar way, the way it has seized up my entire life, when the world is too beautiful and you want to stop and freeze it but the minutes are passing and passing and passing regardless.
Once, a long time ago, I went to a jumprope exhibition in the gym of a middle school. There were teams of tandem jumpers, rope dancers, and synchronized twirling. The students had practiced for many weeks prior to the exhibition. This was back in the days of big VHS camcorders, and I had one on my shoulder so I could record the coolest moments. At the very end of the competition, the gym floor cleared and a single jump roper entered the room from a side door. One of his legs was twisted up behind his head –it looked effortless, he was that flexible and agile–and he did so many tricks so fast and so well, jump-roping the whole time, that I kept the camcorder trained on him. The crowd burst into a roar. 
We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
“It was a time like this. . . when all things fall apart.”
Alison McGhee 