| WFR POETRY |
| WFR POETRY |
You ask
by Linda Laderman
where I come from. This isn’t a question I can easily answer. I am powerless to shove this
narrative into a stanza with an ending that leaves me asking, is that how it happened? If I’d never
known the truth, would it have mattered? Is what you don’t know can’t hurt you, a paradox or an
axiom? I come from an episode told so often it became memory. When they told me your
father keeled over, I grabbed the pair of ceramic dolls cousin Lillian made and smashed them.
Slivers of pink glass sliced my bare feet. I come from luck, taken from my mother’s arms by
a doctor concerned her keening might compel her to throw my body down, like her once
cherished ceramic figures; inanimate objects of regrettable rage.
Linda Laderman is a 73-year-old Michigan poet and writer. A former journalist, she returned to school in her 40s to earn a law degree and master’s of liberal studies. She belongs to the Poetry Craft Collective, a cohort of poets who review and encourage each other’s work. Her poetry can be found in The Jewish Literary Journal, One Art, Third Wednesday, The Write Launch, The Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Poetica Magazine, a journal of contemporary Jewish Writing. Until recently, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com