Rebekah Wolman | What the Hollow Held

What the Hollow Held by Rebekah Wolman. Number 6 in our A.V. Christie Series, selected by Ron Mohring.

[ cover image: Rebekah Wolman ]

Publication:  June 30, 2025 [100 copies]
25 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-23-5
$ 12.00

Rebekah Wolman‘s poems appear in a variety of on-line and print journals and anthologies. She is a 2021 winner of Cultural Daily‘s Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, the 2022 winner of the Small Orange Emerging Woman Poet Honor, and a finalist for the 2023 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Award. A former middle-school principal, learning specialist, and English teacher, she is based in San Francisco, California, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, and reads poetry for Psaltery and Lyre.

Duet in Mixed Minor Keys (Abandonné)

Our mother swathed her violin in silk,
a paisley scarf, before she set it gently
on the velvet lining of its case—putting it
to bed, she said.
                            Come time to clean the piano,
she swiped roughly with a rag, lowest A to highest C,
the way we wished that we could pound the keys,
cacophony we craved to make but weren’t allowed,
full-fist seven-octave fortissimo glissando
as if there were no workings to protect.
Then the final flourish, a continuation
of the motion of her arm at the end
of its sweep along the keyboard. She left
it all—us, the cleaning, and our father
working slowly through Beethoven sonatas.

[ Thanks to Naugatuck River Review for first publishing this poem. ]
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