Shelley Savren

Sample Poems

The Smell of Stones

My grandmother’s dream foretells

her mother’s death in Auschwitz.

The house shines, a dim Shabbas

glow and I smell stones

in my mother’s black iron oven

as they whiten to dust.

My mother calls me.

As I walk through her house,

a salty odor of smoking meat sticks

to the air, kitchen counters clean and wet.

Outside, grapes cluster on vines.

I reach through the window,

gather handfuls and purple my mouth,

juice dripping down my chin.

My mother’s voice grows fainter.

Out front ripe vegetables dress

her grocery store in yellows, greens,

reds. Bottles of milk lie wrapped in ice.

She sits on broken steps and reads

her Hungarian bible, black dress covering

the length of her, black babushka

winding her head like a chain.

My four-year-old daughter listens

at her side, waves me over, and I run

toward them, see my mother’s hair

burning, skin peeling.

When I reach

through the barbed wire fence

to touch her hands, they melt.

She disappears.

As I chase her voice, it fades

into the smoke. The dream vanishes

and there is only the smell

of stones.

 

---

 

Who’s The Message Really For?

Mom, I am. . . I’m really sorry

the thing I did. . .

Well Mom, what’s the use?

Can you call us when you get back?

It’s 8:12 p.m. Outside, a chilling fog.

I arrive expecting my daughter’s

call, and instead I get this.

No matter how many times I listen,

there is no way to reach

that child, maybe 4 or 5

with a raspy voice, to tell him

his mom won’t call –

not because she doesn’t want to –

but because his message,

traveling over billions

of tiny electrical sparks,

arrived on my machine, not hers.

I remember my own child’s voice

at that age, high pitched

and smooth, the innocence

of herb tea brewing.

She would wait at the door,

dragging her blanket and wet thumb,

rubbing the sandman from her eyes.

Now she’s seventeen and slipping away.

I don’t know who I am or how I feel

about anything anymore,

is the message she leaves

as she goes to concerts

far from home on school nights

and I can’t say no.

She streaks her hair

for another look, hoping to meet

a boy who will like her more

than just a friend.

Last week, we dipped our feet

into the ocean. This morning,

frost on the windshield.

I listen once again: . . . Well Mom,

what’s the use? Can you call us. . .

then press erase.

But, there‘s something about faith.

Try her one more time, I whisper.

---

Hands

for Elijah on our wedding day

I trace the lines in your palms

to where you find me,

the place where love begins.

Those hands that enclose mine

or wrap around me in the lip of night,

that touch me where I catch my breath

and gently frame my face.

You sat holding my hand

that first night,

slipping yourself into my life.

I learned how you held your mother,

blessing her cancer-filled body

before it returned to the earth.

How those same hands held a clarinet

playing to save your life in Vietnam.

And how afterwards you grew

your hair to your hips,

beard to your belly

and held handle bars in the wind

as you bicycled through Europe,

then backpacked in the French Alps –

Chamonix, Mont Blanc.

Today, beside you,

I hold your sturdy hands in mine,

as I pledge to do

when they are wrinkled

and dotted with age.

I see in your eyes,

the place where our souls entwine,

like the braided havdalah candle

our hands light to usher the Sabbath

into a new week, a new world,

where we begin.

---

Meeks Bay

I’m up to my nipples in lake

filled with a new language

that speaks through me

like a hand crawling

into my chest, fondling my breath,

composing my heart’s beat,

repainting my blood

a kind of aquamarine.

My nipples swell

like the time they dripped with milk

and life depended on them

the way soil depends on the worm

or the tide is pulled by the moon.

That suckling sensation, not unlike

the quiver from the lover’s tongue,

brings me closer to everything wet.

I plunge my head, break

this crystal and crack

each ripple of water into light,

rocking tiny pebbles

in their sandy cradles below.

Ducks hear that shatter,

search for a runway

and dunk their filthy bills.

Mosquitoes hover, dancing just above

the place where sunlight dissolves.

One pesky insect reaches my skin

before water does

and steals my blood,

carrying the color of aquamarine

as it jumps back into air.

When I step from this lake,

my nipples will soften in the sun

and my poems will flow like milk.