A poem.

I'm browsing scholarly journals looking for papers that thrill me or authors that might want to get to know me. In the shuffle, I came across this poem by Jehanne Dubrow. It's about where I got my undergrad, the place I garnered a minor in Judaic studies -- if only they had had a major option. But then again, I suppose this poem says it all. This is excerpted from a 2006 issue of Judaism.

Judaic Studies
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The department doesn't even fill a floor
but one room at the university,
fluorescents dark behind a frosted door
which answers woodenly to every knock.
No secretary waiting there to call
me puppele, German for little doll,
or feed me raspberry-swirled rugelach,
the sweetness now an eaten memory.
On certain days, Nebraska could be Poland,
the same blond silences of plains, each field
a never-ending corridor of gold.
What happened to the open door? It's sealed,
with every light tumed off, and no one home
except the wind breathing alone, alone.

JEHANNE DUBROW received her MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College
Park. She is currently working toward a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln where she also serves as the senior poetry reader of Prairie Schooner. Her
work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Tikkun, Midstream and The New
England Review.