At peace that
final day we

sat with Brahms.
My mother asked

what we’d fought
about, why.

I wasn’t fighting,
I told her. She was.

Nebach, she said.
She always got me.

In our family,
that word meant true.

In the Yiddish,
it means sadly.

Carla Sarett’s recent work appears in Third Wednesday, Hamilton Stone Review, isacoustic, Bowery Gothic and elsewhere; and has been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize.  A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, will be published in 2022.