​POETRY  -  
          With the Theme of Dreams
"At least it wasn't the forests outside of town,"
                               Photo by Weebly.com                                    

Epigenetic Memory
by Karen Marker

​​This is my long-ago memory.
Or maybe it wasn’t mine
but my grandfather’s.
Did he see it happen?
Did I dream he did?
 
His father, head down in the mud.
It was not a bullet that killed him
but the heel of a horse
when all he ever wanted to do was help
get the wheel of a wagon unstuck.
 
Who else saw it happen?
Did people scream, cry, come to carry him 
on a board to a doctor or direct to a morgue,
to which grave did he go?
At least it wasn’t the forests outside of town
he was brought to alive, later
buried in a pit. 
 
In 1890 all my grandfather Sam wanted,
at thirteen, was to get out of Vilna.
Leave his mother, five sisters,
go to Philly with his uncles to look for a job.
He didn’t want to think any more
about accidents even though he later had one--
at the same age as his father Velvel.
I wasn’t there, but I heard the story.
Remembered it was a semi that hit the car
he was driving as a traveling salesman
and he survived, after weeks in a coma.
Still, I wonder about all that trauma.
 
When I went back to Vilna it was called Vilnius.
I didn’t know where to start looking. 
It was July, cold with rain.
All the time
I worried about falling,
hitting my head, the mud,
how to get out.
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​Karen Marker submits poems to Rattle’s Poets Respond (to the news) and reads this poetry on the open mic with RattleCast. This past May she was a featured reader for Rivertown Poets out of Petaluma. Karen was honored to win first place prize for an essay, “Ruth in the Redwoods,” in the 2021 Keats Soul Making contest and that one of her poems was chosen to be in the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Karen is also grateful that she had the opportunity to work with the Young Writers Program through Santa Cruz’s Cornerstone Project, and to work with so many talented poets through PandaPoets and through OLLI including Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank and Jannie Dresser.
Other works in this issue:
Poetry: 
​Jacob's Ladder
For Sam at Pharmaca

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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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​Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways  ​volunteer staff.