PoetryMagazine.com
Susan Cohen
USA
| Susan Cohen is the author of
Throat Singing (Word Tech/Cherry Grove Collections;
2012). Her poems have won the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the
Anderbo Poetry Prize, an Atlanta Review International
Publication Prize, and a New Millennium Writings Best
Poem Award. She's also been a River Styx
International Poetry Contest winner and a Pushcart Prize
nominee. She lives in Berkeley, where she was a
contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine
and a faculty member of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of
Journalism before re-discovering poetry a dozen or so years
ago. |
That Year I Read Anne
Frank’s Diary
She is my shadow,
made of ash
no soap or time
will ever wash
away. She shares my
observant stare.
Did she have the
same trouble with her hair?
She’s my age in her
last photograph.
I’m thirteen, shy
as my buds of breasts,
that year my best
friend chooses to confess
I’m the only Jew
her mom can bear.
She’s
my shadow,
see how tight she
clings – first black dress,
soot twin. Why
else would my friend ask, not
meaning much:
how many of you are there?
As if I’m me and
others, too. That year
a new girl sits
with me in class:
she’s
my shadow.
originally
published in Throat Singing (WordTech/Cherry Grove)
Page 2
© Copyright, 2012,
Susan Cohen.
All rights reserved.
These poems from THROAT SINGING by Susan Cohen, published by Cherry
Grove Collections, Cincinnati, OH, 2012. |