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and other poems by
42 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
ISBN: 978-1-964277-78-3
Release Date: February 17, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $18/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. This only applies to orders being shipped within the US.
Fred Pelka grew up the child of German immigrants. He is the author of The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (ABC-CLIO, 1997), The Civil War Letters of Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). A Different Blaze, his first book of poems, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2014. Pelka was a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow.
Fred Pelka’s latest book is a treasure: ranging over time, place, subject these poems are rich in both language and material. Ranging from a childhood where a portraits of both Hitler and Jesus hung above “our ersatz fireplace”—that last phrase so telling—to the death of his wife (“For My Soon to Be Late Wife”) these poems are impelled by the writer’s need to write them. And, readers, you need to read them! ~Anne Finger
Seeing you on the street in your wheelchair,
the Babushka stopped to drop coins into your lap.
We tried to explain we didn’t need her money,
being American tourists,
but the old woman pressed her rubles into your hands,
murmuring many soft kindnesses.
We’d been told the weather in St. Petersburg
is ten months’ anticipation followed by
two months’ disappointment.
That winter afternoon we were all anticipation
even as darkness fell early, streetlights sharpened on snow,
the two of us eager to return to our hotel to make love and then
surrender to delicious jet-lag.
Worn down by her earnest commiseration,
we thanked her in the only Russian we knew.
She smiled, and we smiled back, happy not to be
another disappointment.
The worker arrives on foot to tend to these
chipped and cracking monuments,
and to the hedges and rust-stained iron fence
that surround them.
And since this is a Jewish cemetery
in a small town in southwest Germany,
you know without looking there can be
no marker here dating past the 1940s.
A hapless stranger,
visiting from outer space and yet
familiar with the Hebrew calendar,
might think it a miracle—
that death itself was somehow exiled since
there’s room to spare on this hillside
where the poplar trees sway so serenely
against the Palatinate sky.
The worker wears ash grey overalls
and carries his hoe draped like a rifle
across his stolid shoulder.
Far overhead a contrail cuts
a fuzzy birthmark
only to grow ever less defined,
signifying a distance traveled
that can never be retraced.
The morning sulks with impending rain,
held off for a moment when the sun bursts through—
star-shell of anxious illumination.
Here is that line of French infantry, their bayonets
the bristles of unshaved chins, their eyes drawn,
but of course, to your breasts,
which they admire or curse or consider
as merely another target in a world at war yet
oblivious to its most lethal motivations.
The post on which you’re tied stands alone at the center of a lawn
sloping into a realm of spirits, where the ghosts of all
the officers you entertained—French, Belgian, German—
sip cold drinks and draw lines across blood-stained maps.
You were less spy, I think, than an accomplished liar,
pretending to be Indonesian and thus exotic to a western public
already sated—even jaded—with the plundered wealth of Asia.
So where was it you learned the Dance of Seven Veils?
How was it you acquired such a sheen of mystic credibility?
Like a defanged cobra, measuring the world outside its basket
but writhing to the rhythms of some cross-legged piper,
you were the seemingly dangerous woman caught
in your own pretensions, your cover story undone,
your life the cipher no intelligence service could decrypt.
You decline the blindfold, staring at your executioners as if gazing
into your own abbreviated life—the defiant dance of
the single woman,
the half-breed adrift in a world flush with eugenics.
Do you also decline the final cigarette,
you who boasted of your time in the opium dens of Mumbai,
the secret annex of the Sultan’s harem? Of course not.
Your eyes instead burn with the intensity of a woman
determined to defy her past while scorning all those men
too weak to stop the carnage, too dense to see
the dancer behind the veil.