Under a table at the library fair, she had found in a broken cardboard box a book of 425 poems about the death of the poet’s child. “Row, row, all the way from the Pale of Settlement to the crematoria,” she now read out loud. I kept getting up to look out the front window, take a leak, play with the cat, seek employment. Each time I returned, she was smaller than I remembered. I shrugged, or howled, as the music dictated. Empty scraps of paper fell periodically from the sky. To this day, I’m still surprised that there’s no “e” in lightning.
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