Jane Schapiro is the author of a volume of poetry, Tapping This Stone, (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1995) and the nonfiction book, Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks (University of Wisconsin, 2003), selected for the Notable Trials Library. Her chapbook Mrs. Cave’s House won the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook competition. Her essays and poems have appeared in publications such as the American Book Review, The American Scholar, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Yankee among others.
These poems are excerpts from a larger unpublished manuscript titled
Let The Wind Push Us Across.
Photos by Shin-ichi Kumanomido
Website by Eliana Brown
P
We stopped, laughed, leaned
our bikes against the sign.
What a confluence— city, sign, the two of us—
one layer aligned with another
like those transparencies in The World Book:
each sheet a view of the human body.
I used to love turning the pages,
placing the nervous system over the muscular
the muscular over the circulatory—
veins in sync with tendons
tendons with nerves. In front of the sign
we posed: photograph, genes, memory.
Even now, I write sisters, feel coalescence
rushing in like a jolt of faith.
Sisters, Oregon
