Shifting
Rent from DeepDyve- Shifting
After he died of Spanish flumy grandmother remarrieda widower who brought alongtwo boys, three girls to addto her five in the crowdedBrooklyn apartment where everyoneshifted to make room for the otherssharing beds and one toilet and twolamp lights to do homework byor mending. And I wonder, didshe tell them beforehandthat the tailor named Jacobwas coming to live with thembecause his wife had diedand he needed a motherfor his five childrenand she needed a husbandto help support her five childrenand it was a mitzvah that they foundeach other and it wasn’t a matterof love but necessity and they should neverforget their own father but show respectfor the man and his children and maybelove, a luxury, would followor maybe it wouldn’t and so it wasone afternoon he climbed the sixflights to the apartment with his fivechildren and knocked on the door. [End Page 96]
Joan I. Siegel is the author of Hyacinth for the Soul (Deerbrook Editions), Light at Point Reyes (Shabda P), and The Fourth River (Shabda P), as well as coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter. She is the recipient of both the New Letters Poetry Award and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including the American Scholar, Gettysburg Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She was a finalist for the 2012 Pablo Neruda Prize.
