Post-birth my mother needed to bathe
three times a day After each I was
to blow-dry the rupture
with cool air roving over her
blue translucence We searched
but could not find the tear
The ancestors knelt beside the pink
walls and sang wringing their hands
in shame: keep searching
keep searching or we will not heal
BARBARA SCHWARTZ is the author of the chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017). A finalist for the 1913 Poetry Prize, her hybrid poetry manuscript What Survives is the Fire was selected for Boomerang Theater’s First Flight New Play, and has been included in The University of Miami’s Holocaust Theater Catalog. Her poems have appeared in Upstreet, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. Barbara lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.
