Jehanne DubrowJehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and others. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press 2009) and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press 2007). A second poetry collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize and will be published in 2009. A third collection, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010.
Jehanne Dubrow's first full-length collection, After the Broken World, was selected as the winner of the 2007 Three Candles First Book Prize and will be published later this year. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Shenandoah, and Gulf Coast, among other publications.
Some of her poems
Shulamith Speaks
Jehanne Dubrow
Silence is also speech. – Yiddish proverb
It’s also speech—those words his body chalks
on me, and I on him, our sheet-white terms
which need no voice to occupy a room.
I can talk about his collarbone for weeks
but don’t. I’d rather touch his face, become
his skin’s interpreter. Why should I shake
our sleep with languages? What breaks
inside the mechanism when our limbs
are labeled Arm or Leg?
The hinges creak.
Our flesh-and-blood machine which used to hum,
self-lubricating, metrical, will jam
where wheels collide with wheels: the axle spokes,
the teeth, the slot and corresponding hook,
not thrumming ecstasy, but stopped and dumb.
Ars Poetica
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?—Czeslaw Milosz
Can I be saved by writing your hands
onto my skin? Or by imagining
your breath? The mouthfuls of air won’t reek
of burning flesh but taste of wine. Pull back
the sheets so that they rustle like a wing
against a wing. The room will fill with birds.
Not birds with wire claws but mockingbirds
whose feathers are not formed from clouds of ash.
Our sleep won’t carry nightmares in its arms
but drop them by the door like heavy stones.
The moon could smudge the wall with fingerprints,
but there won’t be a moon, and I will find
my way to you through memory or touch,
by following my voice back to its source.
BASIA
Warsaw, 2002
Twelve years ago, I was the little girl
who watched her work. She cleaned my parents’ house,
cooked meals, took care of me. I learned from her
a soft language, each phrase sounding like hush
and the swishing shut of my bedroom door.
This time when we meet, phrases I used to speak,
easily as swallowing mint tea,
taste strange. The words are stale on my tongue and stick.
We stand beneath a farmer’s tree to steal
his pears. Taller, I reach the higher boughs.
Small, smaller than I thought, she shakes the trunk.
We laugh as sweet, green fruits tumble down.
She shook me once like this. When I was five,
a butterscotch stuck sideways in my throat.
Her arms were strong from lifting pots of soup
and kneading dough and maybe I felt light,
the breath kept from my lungs. I was her sack
after the shops. Upended. Emptied out.
We must have both breathed then. Against the floor,
an amber candy glistened with my spit.
Charm Against a Broken Tongue
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.—Czeslaw Milosz
When words erased the need for ink,
blank pages fluttered like a winding sheet and mamaloshen crumbled into dust.
Translation. The mother tongue smelled of a room:
unopened prayer shawls pinned upon the wall
like linen butterflies. Aleph and bet
took wing as raven-messengers, letters
with claws too blunt to tear into the world.
To touch the dead is treyf. To touch dead verse,
what then? What of the Edelshteins who shout
their poetry in languages that fade
in direct light? This Hall of Oddities—
the yad points toward a book that isn’t there,
a silver finger gesturing at night.
SHULAMITH READS THE WHITE HOTEL
(with a line from the novel by D.M. Thomas)
I could not stop myself I was in flames.
Was it the shock of words like fuck and cock
or was it Babi Yar, a death that came
after four chapters filled with sex, which shamed
my hands to throw away the paperback?
I could not stop myself. I'd felt the flames
in other books before but never blamed
myself for shutting them then coming back
for more. Was Babi Yar, a death that came
and came again (pornography of pain),
somehow a better read? Or was sextalk—
I couldn't stop myself I was inflamed
—sprawled out beside the pit of stiff remains,
live body parts beside the dead, what took
me back to Babi Yar? Two deaths became
the one: the death-of-love renamed
as love-of-death, as Liebestod. Bookstruck,
I couldn't stop from bursting into flame
at this, my White Hotel, my death that came.
Fragment From A Nonexistent Yiddish Poet
Ida Lewin (1906-1938)AlwaysWinter, Poland
My mind grew quiet
like a house at dusk,
rooms black, except
for moonlight stroking walls.
Then sleep unlocked the door.
When sleep appeared, removed
its robe, and wrapped its arms
around my neck,
whispering plunder in my ear,
I even welcomed death
to snuggle down. When death
sistered itself to sleep,
not brusque, but coy and clever
as the start of fall —
signaled
by a first vermilion leaf,
a chill against my cheek –
then the sky opened like a box
too full of diamond stars.
When the stars reduced all nights
to a jar of stones,
gray pebbles in a hand,
then my mind could settle inits house and still.
The Pressed Flower
On her own wedding day the Shulamite woman met her later self, Shulamith,
promised bride of Shoah. What language did they speak?—two lovelies, who
held each other’s hands, exchanging gifts. Bundles of myrrh. A grave in the air.
The children used to choose
a flower, placing a rose
within a stack of books,
until sleek petals broke
or flattened like a page,
the blossom mashed and aged
by words, two covers lined
with pollen gilt.
You’ll find
me there, smoothed among
Celan and Song of Songs.
I’m blue forget-me-not,
the genital violet,
belled lily of the valley.
I’m text and ovary.
Shulamith, on Honeymoon
In West Virginia,
we cut pink clusters of wisteria
then placed them in a waterglass beside our bed,
where day by day, they bled,
fading from fuschia’s bite
to salmon pink to shell, a last embarrassed pink (near-white
but still remembering red),
so like the secret places on our skin, you said
from in between my legs—my body opening for yours,
at last, a blossoming (of course
a bud that opens on its own
still wants another’s touch), we two alone,
a flower twisting on its stem, a flower bent
beneath the weight of dew—no shame in scent,
in rain, the aftertaste
of petals in our mouths, my chaste
but unchaste hands feeling the pulse beneath your collarbone,
we two alone
and always tangled in that room,
the bed, the glass, the pink (oh pink) wisteria in bloom.
Shulamith Writes Fuck You
fuck you you chimney stack
you living body made to choke
on prussian blue blue face burned black
you rigor mortis turned to smoke
fuck you you topos bent to make
a rhymed barbarity go fuck
yourself you charcoal comic book
you linearity train track
which travels south while time runs back
to nil fuck you you stains of ink
across the page you stack
of bleeding languages that stink
you gangrene words fuck you black milk
fuck you and all the worlds you broke
Charm Against a Broken Tongue
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.—Czeslaw Milosz
When words erased the need for ink,
blank pages fluttered like a winding sheet and mamaloshen crumbled into dust.
Translation. The mother tongue smelled of a room:
unopened prayer shawls pinned upon the wall
like linen butterflies. Aleph and bet
took wing as raven-messengers, letters
with claws too blunt to tear into the world.
To touch the dead is treyf. To touch dead verse,
what then? What of the Edelshteins who shout
their poetry in languages that fade
in direct light? This Hall of Oddities—
the yad points toward a book that isn’t there,
a silver finger gesturing at night.
SHULAMITH READS THE WHITE HOTEL
(with a line from the novel by D.M. Thomas)
I could not stop myself I was in flames.
Was it the shock of words like fuck and cock
or was it Babi Yar, a death that came
after four chapters filled with sex, which shamed
my hands to throw away the paperback?
I could not stop myself. I'd felt the flames
in other books before but never blamed
myself for shutting them then coming back
for more. Was Babi Yar, a death that came
and came again (pornography of pain),
somehow a better read? Or was sextalk—
I couldn't stop myself I was inflamed
—sprawled out beside the pit of stiff remains,
live body parts beside the dead, what took
me back to Babi Yar? Two deaths became
the one: the death-of-love renamed
as love-of-death, as Liebestod. Bookstruck,
I couldn't stop from bursting into flame
at this, my White Hotel, my death that came.
Fragment From A Nonexistent Yiddish Poet
Ida Lewin (1906-1938)AlwaysWinter, Poland
My mind grew quiet
like a house at dusk,
rooms black, except
for moonlight stroking walls.
Then sleep unlocked the door.
When sleep appeared, removed
its robe, and wrapped its arms
around my neck,
whispering plunder in my ear,
I even welcomed death
to snuggle down. When death
sistered itself to sleep,
not brusque, but coy and clever
as the start of fall —
signaled
by a first vermilion leaf,
a chill against my cheek –
then the sky opened like a box
too full of diamond stars.
When the stars reduced all nights
to a jar of stones,
gray pebbles in a hand,
then my mind could settle inits house and still.
The Pressed Flower
On her own wedding day the Shulamite woman met her later self, Shulamith,
promised bride of Shoah. What language did they speak?—two lovelies, who
held each other’s hands, exchanging gifts. Bundles of myrrh. A grave in the air.
The children used to choose
a flower, placing a rose
within a stack of books,
until sleek petals broke
or flattened like a page,
the blossom mashed and aged
by words, two covers lined
with pollen gilt.
You’ll find
me there, smoothed among
Celan and Song of Songs.
I’m blue forget-me-not,
the genital violet,
belled lily of the valley.
I’m text and ovary.
Shulamith, on Honeymoon
In West Virginia,
we cut pink clusters of wisteria
then placed them in a waterglass beside our bed,
where day by day, they bled,
fading from fuschia’s bite
to salmon pink to shell, a last embarrassed pink (near-white
but still remembering red),
so like the secret places on our skin, you said
from in between my legs—my body opening for yours,
at last, a blossoming (of course
a bud that opens on its own
still wants another’s touch), we two alone,
a flower twisting on its stem, a flower bent
beneath the weight of dew—no shame in scent,
in rain, the aftertaste
of petals in our mouths, my chaste
but unchaste hands feeling the pulse beneath your collarbone,
we two alone
and always tangled in that room,
the bed, the glass, the pink (oh pink) wisteria in bloom.
Shulamith Writes Fuck You
fuck you you chimney stack
you living body made to choke
on prussian blue blue face burned black
you rigor mortis turned to smoke
fuck you you topos bent to make
a rhymed barbarity go fuck
yourself you charcoal comic book
you linearity train track
which travels south while time runs back
to nil fuck you you stains of ink
across the page you stack
of bleeding languages that stink
you gangrene words fuck you black milk
fuck you and all the worlds you broke
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