My mother brought me to a perfect stranger
who sat me at her tiny square kitchen table
where there must have been words spoken
but I only remember she knew
I wasn’t doing my homework
or paying enough attention in school
and she had numbers carved into her arm
I think she was a teacher
who went to hell and back
when she was just a child
she escaped a concentration camp
with a warmth that encircled me
gave me the key to sunrise
and my mother somehow knew
she would give me my stamina
and I would leave believing
everything I did mattered
because the world was waiting
for me to make it a better place
Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who grew up in Brooklyn, New York and now lives in a forest in Pennsylvania. So grateful to be a full-time poet now, she has written more than 800 poems in the past two years. Within that time, her poems have been published in or are now forthcoming in Chiron Review, ONE ART, Invisible City, Ekstasis, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Green Silk Journal, The Write Launch, The Gentian, Across the Margin, October Hill Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Poemeleon, Beltway Poetry, Foreshadow, The Loch Raven Review, and others. Within the last few months one of her poems was nominated for Best of the Net by Cosmic Daffodil, and three poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Umbrella Factory Magazine.
The Queens Review 