Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

Miriam Dancing—After a Painting of Miriam by Marc Chagall

I never danced like this.
Decked out   baring my breasts
for some man’s pleasure.

Who does he think I am?

One of Gaughin’s native girls?
Part of his harem? All of us circling,
hands clapped above our heads.

Who am I to him? A muse? A figure
plastered on a white canvas board?
Roses doves anemones swirling round.

I am not his feckless dream.

What happened to the desert?
To my feet pressed into sand? To timbrel and lyre?
To my words echoing off pink rocky cliffs?

To songs spilling from a woman’s mouth?
To light spilling from clouds?
To a chorus of hallelujahs

quenching an unquenchable thirst?
I say no more throttled tongues.
I will sing, be still, then dance.


Bess’s Lament

I didn’t know he was a magic man, a shape-shifter. When I met him, he was Erich, trapeze artist, diminutive Jew. I knew he liked streudel, stuffed cabbage, his mother’s babka. He held me with his bird fingers—cupping my chin—teasing me with his flashing eyes. I dreamt he was small enough to fit in my pocket. Fold him up in quarters like a white handkerchief, to keep him near.

In the beginning, I was his magic girl. Swish. I hear it still. The whoosh of the black cloth over the box. The infinite darkness just for a moment. Stepping out, I smiled. Released from danger. Never scared. Never scarred.

Then he became Houdini. The only trace of our act together, the way he twined and untwined my curls at night. I had my own disappearing act. He dazzled, unlocked manacles, handcuffs, climbed out of milk cans, trunks, coffins. My upside-down man unleashed himself from a straitjacket in midair as I held my breath.

I wanted to always be his gamin girl, to keep a small flame for him, before and even after death. Do ghosts have breath?

In my old age I became what I always was. A forsaken angel with wings of stone.


Center of the World
(After Larry Blair’s Photograph of a House in New Mexico)

This is the center of the world
she says.
But she doesn’t notice
the scorched desert sands
the cracks in the adobe walls
the tears in the thin parched skin of the world.

This is the center of the world
she says.
And she doesn’t notice the way
the horizontal white lines of the roof
never meet or the way two
stripes form a hex   a portent of disaster.

She doesn’t remember red clay or dust
or her fingers digging and scratching
in soil for signs of water. If this is
the way it was she says it is all
forgotten. The dryness on her tongue.
The arid stretches of land.

The memory of arroyos and creeks
that once widened into a blue
haze of waters. Rain flooding her heart.

Now this must be the
earth’s center.
The fragrant spill of pine or locust
the pale peach squares
of light the strips of wood framing
earth and sky.

She bows to the single bare tree
In the courtyard. Trunk thin as white birch
reaching to the edge of a world.


About the Author

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English where she teaches autobiography, creative writing, women’s literature, American and cotemporary literature, and Holocaust Literature. She has been published in many journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Home Planet News, Phoebe, Black Buzzard Review, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life (Routledge, 2000 ). Her chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press. Most recently she co-edited with Laurence Carr a collection of works by Hudson Valley women writers entitled A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, which won the 2013 USA Best Book Award for Anthology. Her multicultural and global literature anthology, Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Crockett and the late Dr. Carley Bogarad is now in its fifth edition and used nationwide.

(click here to close this window)