Selected Publications

From In Deep:

First Lesson

Children, if I told you I’d teach you

everything you need to know,

would you know to be suspicious?

Take this pebble here. One, you say,

of many. All mere chips of boulders,

once jagged, now polished

in the tumbler of tide-churned sand.

Good. Yet I will teach you

which to lift from the multitude

along the shore, how to close your eyes

and assess this particular pebble’s

cool weight in your palm,

the diameter of its smoothness,

the course it traveled over the seabed,

what will happen if you take it home.

How its jewel glint will dull as it dries.

How your fingers will rediscover it

in the linty depths of a pocket

and how you will wonder why

this lump mattered enough

to carry it so far. How perhaps,

even still, it will recall to you

the array of scattered stones,

the fanning waves, the granular sands,

wet, then dry, on your unshod feet,

the seal heads popping up,

the sweep of cloudless sky.

How you stood there,

among the wheeling seabirds,

and grasped momentarily

how time moves and stands still,

how you are as broad as the universe

and as minuscule, as fragile,

as the fractured, discarded shells,

half-buried in the shifting hillocks,

which could cut your mortal sole.

How you too are one dull chip

off the old block of primal matter

among countless strewn millions

tumbled and worn by tides,

yet you too are matchless

when gleaming. That’s what

this lesson can teach you.

Ready?  Open your book.

Copyright Judith Sanders.
Originally published in Vox Populi and In Deep (Kelsay Books, 2022).

From The Universe with Borscht:

The Ferris Wheel

I danced past the hospital playroom

where bald children rode tricycles,

because you, my son, would get well.

You lay comatose on morphine.

At last a specialist

jumpstarted you.

Near home, from your car seat,

you spotted the annual carnival,

the whirling rides, the colored lights.

So I carried you, still limp,

in dinosaur pajamas, feverish head

tucked into the curve of my neck.

We threaded through

sturdy, scampering children

to the Ferris wheel.

Next year, I whispered

into the perfect shell of your ear,

we’ll ride to the top,

and everything down here

will look small and far away.

Copyright Judith Sanders.
Originally published in Blue Heron Review and The Universe with Borscht (Kelsay Books, 2025). 

Bubbe and Zayde Take Me to the Ice Capades 

The Sabine Woman

Feeding the Horses at Crystal Spring Farm

Cherry Tree Elegy

The Rubber Woman

A Mourner's Kaddish

Autumn Walk at Beechwood Farms

Late to Meet You at the Indian Restaurant

Why Do So Many Women Get Breast Cancer? (Op-ed, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

On Not Speaking Yiddish (The Jewish Literary Journal)