My Mother’s Alligator Pocketbook
gleams like high-gloss patent leather,
but don’t dare make that mistake,
these erratic ovoid squares once sheathed
exotic reptiles that slinked through sizzling tropic
climes before arriving at the Upper East Side
store where cousin Sandra (nee Sadie) referred
my mother, as if she needed the secret knock
to shop, humming Hernando’s Hideaway.
The pocketbook (nee purse) she wore to temple
on the High Holidays,
to the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera
for those few short years
when Daddy could afford the tickets,
sitting in the Dress Circle, stroking
alligator on her lap, while diamond dangles
and sultry (nee feral) furs tickled her neck,
remembering, I imagine,
the soiled fingernails of children
sitting beside her on the piano bench
for the lessons she used to give
in her mother’s living room,
on the upright crammed beside the sofa
where, at night, my mother slept
whenever aunts and uncles, escaped
from Poland, usurped her bed
with their bony bodies, whispering in secret
torrents and barely muffled guttural grunts
behind her closed bedroom door.
Daddy secretly sold the diamonds,
then the furs when she wasn’t looking.
But my mother’s alligator pocketbook
still sleeps behind my bedroom door,
swathed in newborn-baby flannel. I carry it
to temple sometimes, even knowing, now,
about species in danger of extinction,
these particular predators long-since extinguished,
only their sleek skins remaining
to remind me of my mother (nee woman, wife, lover),
sleeping all her life with one eye open,
watchful, ever watchful, as a reptile
in the risk-filled wild.
__________
Elizabeth Edelglass is a longtime fiction writer and book reviewer turned poet during pandemic isolation. Her short fiction has been widely published, winner of the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her newborn poetry has appeared in more than twenty journals, was shortlisted for the Fish Prize, and won third prize in the Voices of Israel Reuben Rose Competition.