till the day she died at the age of ninety-four, she wore perfume, silk hose, a brooch of rubies, a triangle scarf. she went down to the park, why don't you find yourself a boyfriend, i pestered her all the time, so many cute available grandpas playing checkers and chess. are you kidding me, she would reply, those old farts! she spent her evenings polishing silver forks, spoons, knives, muttering proudly that once upon a time this was her inheritance and now my dowry. on her deathbed she called me over, pulled me close, with passion and frenzy of a long-awaited confession she blurted out i am one hundred years old but don't tell anyone. i left the room and told everyone, but they all said not to worry, that grandma was just senile, losing her mind, imagining things. on the way to the cemetery, i kept staring ahead at the hearse where she traveled alone like a queen, as our family followed in a procession of lincolns; no, grandma wasn't senile at all, she really was a hundred years old, with pogroms, revolutions, wars, houses burned, husbands died, papers vanished, to shave off six, seven years was a charming indiscretion in a story of a woman

Marina Rubin's first chapbook Ode to Hotels came out in 2002, followed by Once in  2004 and Logic in 2007. Her work has appeared in 13th Warrior,  Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review,  5AM; Coal  City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, The Portland Review, The Worcester Review and many more. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007. She is an associate editor of Mudfish, an arts and literary magazine in Tribeca. She lives in New York City where she works as a headhunter on Wall Street while writing her fourth book, a  collection of flash fiction stories. This is her website: www.marinarubin.com