Origami Boats

I imagined the boat a bright red
though the image was old and sepia toned

Red like the boat my daughter rows
across lakes all summer, happy and

unaware like the smiling people in the photographs
before their bones were hammered to ash.

Standing in the hall of the Holocaust Memorial Museum
I want to fly backwards around the earth

like Superman. I want to save them all.
I make boats out of paper, folding

and unfolding as a kind of prayer. Please
let me make enough boats to carry

all the hair and all the shoes, to travel
back in time to when the smiling people

were still smiling, to say: This is your hair.
Here are your shoes. You’re free to go.

Crystal Condakes teaches English in grades 6-8. She has recently published poetry in The Mom Egg Review; Ekphrastic Review; SWWIM, and prose at Scary Mommy Teen and Tween, and Blunt Moms.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 230 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS), two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.