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Night Visitor
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Night Visitor

by
August 9, 2024
Painting of a room at night illuminated by the moon through the window
Night, Edvard Munch, 1890

Barbara Krasner is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry…

It wasn’t the wind but a whisper that announced your presence. It wasn’t a whisper but a movement that told me you were there. More than a movement, it was a wave, swirling, twirling, whirling around me even as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I knew it was you. Because it’s always you. Come to advise me with your sharp tongue. Warn me in words that mince in your mortar and pestle. Protect me with your fringed shroud. I invoke you. You point your finger at me, shake it, to make me listen. Somewhere in the air your toothless Yiddish words transform to words I can fully understand without struggle. Is there always this connection between now and then? Or does this just come to those of us attuned to those who came before. I remember the first time I saw your photograph. Understood you’d lived right in Newark, across the Passaic from where I’d grown up. My father was eighteen when you died. He didn’t remember you. Your sheitl told me you were observant, tufts of your own hair peeking out from underneath near the ears. Your high neckline told me that, too, but that you liked a little bling, all those seed pearls wrapped around your collar. Other photos later told me how much you loved your grandchildren and how much they loved you, their arms wrapped around you like you were the center of their world, a rock to steady them when their own mother, your daughter, had died. I want to feel the wave again. See your fingers beckon me.
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Barbara Krasner is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry and short fiction. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Ordinary People: Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023 , Paterson Literary Review , Cimarron Review , Mason Street, Poetica, and other literary journals. She is the author of the biographical novel in verse, Ethel's Song: Ethel Rosenberg's Life in Poems (Calkins Creek, 2022), the forthcoming historical novel in verse, Facing the Enemy: How a Nazi Youth Camp in America Tested a Friendship (Calkins Creek, 2023), and two poetry chapbooks, Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018), and Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

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