Erika Meitner

Sep 16, 2024 | newyorker.com | Erika Meitner

even though it is only early September& in the strip mall with the Targetwhere I went to get a sympathy cardfor my sister-in-law whose mom died& wound up instead getting a six-packof sympathy cards because lately my& Beyond next to the also vacatedBuy Buy Baby had just reopenedas a Halloween City, & it is alwaystoo soon for retail holidays, candyin bulk turning up in the seasonalaisle in late August right after schoolsupplies are moved to clearance.

Mar 27, 2024 | poets.org | Erika Meitner |Lee Brown |Lee Ann Roripaugh

Find and share the perfect poems. People going through  hard times don’t listen  to songs about peoplegoing through hard times, says my son. Debt, addiction,  chronic bad luck, unemployment—I’m with you, I say. The only  exception is heartbreak; when you’re deep in it you just want a late-night DJ to spin your pain. The car  radio is playing Jason Isbell  through Wyoming, part of it in Yellowstone National Park, home to 500 of the world’s 900 geysers.

Dec 4, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Erika Meitner

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym. Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot. He's been gone over twenty-five years.

Aug 9, 2023 | electricliterature.com | Wynter K. Miller |Erika Meitner

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Apr 5, 2023 | littlereview.livejournal.com | Erika Meitner

Pesach in Blacksburg By Erika Meitner is ushered in by the neighborhood Easter egg hunt, my kids scrambling beneath backyard playsets for chocolate, by the ads I’ve been seeing on Facebook for weeks for the Messianic Jews welcoming Yeshua at the local Holiday Inn— is matzo that comes in giant bulk multi-packs of six stacked on an end-cap shelf at the Kroger though each of the few Jewish families in town only needs a single box or maybe two and someone (a stockboy?) has hung a neat row of...