Estonian Jewel

Deirdre Bey is a freelance photographer who resides in California. She has traveled the world for photo opportunities.

The Beach at Douglas

a photograph of my mother’s family:
they stride through the frame in jumpers,
scarves, anoraks, each in a different direction.
Big Susan caught half leaping, my aunt’s
reaching arms, and Nana’s pointed nose
remind me of a flock of seagulls scattering,
about to rise.

My mother shakes her head fondly
at this photograph, saying what a funny lot
they are, and by funny she means peculiar,
and by lot she means group, clan, collection
of odd souls thrown onto a grey beach
in the ‘70s, with only blood to bind them,
scarves to shield them from the wind
rustling their anoraks, the wind
sweeping the sand into the sea,
the sea onto the sand, the wind
whipping between these frozen figures
held in flight; stopped from scattering.

In the picture, my mother wears flares, round
glasses, and the grimace she makes in the bright
sun, or the face of the wind. She was first to scatter
from the cold beach, the island of wet promenades
and palm trees, bent by Irish winds
where her sister still lives, dying
of decay in her brain, the grey
matter dissolving, synapses faltering:
her thoughts scatter, her hands shake.

My mother, flown across a sea,
an ocean, and stalled on a dry
continent far from the beach,
from anoraks and the reach
of the wind, shakes her head,
says what a funny lot, and drops
the photograph into the scattered pile,
the shriek of seagulls
caught in her throat.

Holly Kent-Payne will soon begin the MFA program at New York University. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Man with the Beret

Biarritz. Hard to believe I’ve reached
this fabrication by the sea
where kings and empresses once held sway
and Picasso’s brushes
cut bathers into triangles.
        Sitting on a rock and watching
families, well-coiffed dogs, grand-dames
in white shorts and sandals, old couples
holding hands as they walk the quay,
I feel more invisible than air

more foreign than a phantom from the days
of Napoleon III who might at any moment
alight from the Rock of the Virgin.
I want to go home, as much as I first
wished to come here; begin to walk away
just as a man with a battered beret passes by,
as if part of an old cartoon.
Voila! I welcome the joy of cliches
that relieve by returning the familiar,
like a Picasso so often viewed

its angles now form another cartoon,
demanding no more effort than a ritual
performed over and over, reassuring
as rhymes, those predictable and
recollected sounds from earlier lines.
        I think about earlier times,
foreign as the landscapes
of memories,
as La Belle Époque
before the wars and fires.

--Biarritz, France

Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published nine books of poetry as well as fiction, essays, and poems in over 500 journals. She has won fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maryland Arts Council, among others.