Mixed Media, 15” x 13” x 5”

Harlem, 1930

For Grandma Sophie

By Kathryn Fishman-Weaver

My grandmother is seventeen years old.

dancing with my grandfather,

who I will never meet.

They know none of this.

They're just kids. The children 

of immigrants making a new way.

Most importantly, they're in love.

My grandmother twirls, giggling,

under my grandfather's arm.

The band is loud, reckless—the evening 

reverberates with hope. 

This is the America my grandmother 

would always believe in, 

the one she would fight for,

the one she would tell me about 

like a bedtime story. 

Someone calls for a dancing contest. 

They win a bottle of champagne

they never drink. 

It moves with them from New York 

to California and back.

Later, she moves it alone to Florida. 

It is lost somewhere on the move to Missouri.

She doesn't mind. 

It is a story she's drank again and again.

Nearly 100 years later, it spills open,

across this page her granddaughter 

is writing, bubbling up with questions.