Barbara Krasner

Privyet! Welcome to Little Odessa

after Ocean Park 116, by Richard Diebenkorn (USA) 1979
 
The El rumbles across Ocean Parkway, the traffic huddled below in rail shadows. Brighton Beach pedestrians rush along in their black coats, black hats, black kerchiefs, black pants and skirts, black shoes. Ocean Parkway has become Deribasovskaya Ulitza, Odessa’s main thoroughfare. I drive through with my Odessa-born husband and say, When did we get to Ukraine from New Jersey? He parks the car and we enter one of the many so-called Russian restaurants. You know the type. The ones where flaming skewers of shashlik burst out of the kitchen at midnight by tunicked staff. The ones that serve food on tapas-like plates: stuffed vareniki dumplings (choose from potato, cheese, cherries, liver), pickled vegetables, smoked fishes. Until the shashlik comes. I can never stay awake all that long after that and fall asleep in the long car ride over the Verrazano and Outerbridge Crossing back to America, back to Jersey.

**

My Grandfather Papered the Empire State Building

after Untitled, by Carmen Herrera (USA, b. Cuba) 2013
 
Its silhouette shadows a sunlit sky as only a Manhattan skyscraper can do. With its distinctive lines, the Empire State Building satisfies an architect’s heart. And appeals to artists like Carmen Herrera or my paperhanger grandfather, trained in the precise measurements of architecture and carpentry. Where we see curves and possibilities, they saw angles and mathematical calculations. A pedestrian on Thirty-Fourth Steet or even Fifth Avenue cannot see the radio spire unless he flattens himself on the sidewalk. The scope is too large to absorb. Herrera captured part of it. My grandfather stayed indoors, focused on the interiors with his paperhanging tools. But as he slathered the backside of paper with paste, slapped the paper to the wall, he marveled at the architecture. What if he had come to America sooner, before he completed his joiner apprenticeship in Poland? Could he have learned architecture? Could he have planned a better American future? As he smoothed out the paper with his brush, he considered his assets: a wife and children, his hometown cousins and friends, money in his pocket to buy a Brooklyn apartment building. He already reached the pinnacle of the American Dream. 

**

The Holodomor

after Feed Me, by Maria Prymachenko (Ukraine) 1930s?
 
They’re back. The Soviet soldiers, collecting the wheat, storing it in warehouses we cannot access. They come to each collective, swipe us aside, and snatch our harvest with their rat-like claws and snake-like tongues. They scurry, slither through the fields with their scythes, claiming what’s ours as theirs. They each have three eyes, always watching, waiting. The Soviet machine will not stop until each of us drops from The Hunger.
 
Surplus grain piled high
Soft cushion for our dead
Vodka, anyone?

 **

Crystallization

​after A Panel of Experts, by Jean-Michel Basquiat (USA) 1982
 
In the 1960s, John and Faith Hubley produced an animated film and wrote a comic book: Zuckerkandl!  In this film, Zuckerkandl comes from the Austrian village of Adol and is therefore an Adolescent. No interview with the Hubleys, no panel of experts, reveals why they called this character Zuckerkandl. My grandmother’s maiden name was Zuckerkandl. Translation: rock candy. I can only surmise they might have seen articles about my grandmother’s distant cousins, Dr. Emil Zuckerkandl, once head of the University of Vienna’s medical faculty, or his grandson, Emile, who worked with Linus Pauling on the molecular clock. Zuckerkandl. It is a funny name, a conglomeration of craggy sounds that gets stuck in the throat. An ironic name for a family of diabetics.

 **

I Named My Son Matthew

after The Calling of St. Matthew, by Caravaggio (Italy) ca 1600
 
If I had been there, if I had sat at the tavern table on one of those benches, would I have believed? Would I have sat in wonder at this red-robed young man, the one on whose face heavenly light shone? Would I have felt planted, unable to move in such a presence? Would I have leaned into Mattiyahu, poked him in the shoulder and said, This man wants you? Or, would I have advised him to keep counting the taxes he collected, that the only G-d is G-d, and there is no son of G-d. Millennia later, I follow the decisions my ancestors made. 

 **

Winter Break

after Still Life with Books and Candle, by Henri Matisse (France) 1890
 
I wait until everyone is asleep. I sit at the desk in my bedroom, my books piled high. My paper ready. I write. My senior honors thesis about the portrayal of society in Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther and the East German version written two hundred years later, with a bit of Holden Caulfield thrown in. I write longhand with a Flair. This is my drafting method. I write for hours. I have a plan. One chapter every two nights. If I had a candle instead of a single-bulb lamp, the wax would drip onto the desk. If I had a candle, I could imagine myself as Goethe writing in the wee hours, unable to sleep. The books now lay flayed to particular passages I want to quote. The air is still. I write. I write about unrequited love. This is something I’m an expert in, something I share with no one. I just write quotations from German literature in a tiny notebook I picked up in a Hallmark card store. I write now, the thick ink covering the paper. I know my best writing comes in a flurry, a fury, a fever. My words, all in German, may make no sense tomorrow. I write, getting my thoughts down between the lines. Writing longhand will not awaken anyone, not like the typewriter. Once drafted, I’ll get the thesis sit for a while before typing it up, which will also be a marathon, best done to the stylings of the Four Seasons.

 **

At the Palais Garnier

after In the Loge, by Mary Cassatt (France, b. USA) 1878
 
I sit up taller, strategize my every move when I know he is watching me. I’ve come to see Gounod’s “Faust,” and now I’m distracted by my own Mephistopheles, my dead husband’s creditor who will not stop stalking me to pay the debts owed him. Can’t he see this is not the time? I am still in mourning. Yes, I am at the opera, but only because we already had these seats in the loge, and they are hard to come by. I tried to sell them to others, explaining my situation. I even tried to give them away, but Faust is not a happy story for anyone but Mephistopheles. I can spot my Beelzebub out of the corner of my eye, his eyes behind his opera glasses searing my skin. I am burning. Elle est sauvée! a celestial voice announces. She is saved! I snap my fan to action. It cannot extinguish
 
**
 
Ninety Minutes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
 
I.
I lean on my blue metallic cane as I walk through the museum’s accessibility entrance. I head into the Mary Cassatt exhibit, the reason for my visit. The oils and pastels, bursting with yellows and oranges, bring a lightness to my step. That exasperated young girl in tartan plaid seated on the blue divan. The two young children engrossed in filling their pails with beach sand remind me of my granddaughters. The portrait of a young woman in a red velvet chair as she embroiders, two young women sharing gossip, a woman in her private theater box unaware of a man viewing her through his binoculars. 
 
II.
My blue metallic cane rests on my wrist as amble into the European wing. Why have I never seen Pissarro’s city scene of Pont Neuf before? Or Van Gogh’s Rain with scratched-out droplets like a kindergartener’s Crayola drawing? Or forlorn Madame Cezanne in black and white stripes? But wait! What’s this across the room? Matisse’s The Screen Room, rich with Downton Abbey texture and blues. And why do I not know the vibrant, modernist work of Joan Miro, Faust and Marguerite by Belgian Hendrik van August Leys or the wet day in Liverpool from Wapping by John Atkinson Grimshaw? I zigzag from wall to wall, gallery to gallery. Where my eyes lead, my legs follow. 
 
III.
Only when I climb into the backseat of the Chevy Uber to return to my hotel do I remember I even had a blue metallic cane.
 
 **

Constellation
 
I am at The Met, surprised by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck’s painting, Fete Juive or Feast of Tabernacles, 1883. I understand this painting of the holiday Sukkot (in Hebrew) or Sukkos (in Yiddish). I note the vertical lines of the floorboards, ninety-degree angles of the oriental rug. The round metal plate with either a candle or incense. The father’s long black coat and his stovepipe hat on the chair. The daughter in pink, her head cushioned in her father’s confidence and thoughtfulness. 
 
I remember those days, enjoying a special moment with my father. Perhaps in the book department of Korvette’s in West Orange or perusing records at Sam Goody’s in Paramus. Later, meandering the stacked stacks at The Strand in New York City. His taking my hand to cross the Manhattan streets, although I was in my thirties. The drive to his parents’ graves at Oheb Shalom Cemetery in Hillside or his grandparents’ graves on Grove St. in Newark. Drives along Ridge Road in North Arlington and Lyndhurst, pointing out to me where the Steinlaufs once lived. He had lived in North Arlington and Kearny all his life except during the war years that took him to the Deep South for training and then across the pond to England for service in the US Army Air Corps. His temporary assignment cast him into his own sukkah, into the unknown outside his provincial life. After the war, he returned to limits. When what he really wanted were the stars beyond his reach.

 **

Eight-Minute Pictures of the Heart 
  
My hands overhead in contortion, I close my eyes. Four songs? Three? “Midnight Confessions” takes me back to the bedroom and record player I shared with my twin sister. Beautiful. I am dancing in my head. Will that affect the cardio depictions? “Ventura Highway” uses my muscle memory to recall each line. Recall moving into my own room, a new highway separating my twin and me, a new path as she traveled toward math and I toward languages. Earth, Wind & Fire “Do You Remember?” My signature song during college. The song I danced to with my son at his wedding. Songs were longer then.
 
**

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet and historian. She is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). Her work has appeared in more than seventy journals, earning her multiple Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Barbara hosts The Ekphrastic Review’s Ekphrastic Book Club. Visit her author website at www.barbarakrasner.com.