Shifting.

After he died of Spanish flu
my grandmother remarried
a widower who brought along
two boys, three girls to add
to her five in the crowded
Brooklyn apartment where everyone
shifted to make room for the others
sharing beds and one toilet and two
lamp lights to do homework by
or mending. And I wonder, did
she tell them beforehand
that the tailor named Jacob
was coming to live with them
because his wife had died
and he needed a mother
for his five children
and she needed a husband
to help support her five children
and it was a mitzvah that they found
each other and it wasn't a matter
of love but necessity and they should never
forget their own father but show respect
for the man and his children and maybe
love, a luxury, would follow
or maybe it wouldn't and so it was
one afternoon he climbed the six
flights to the apartment with his five
children and knocked on the door.