They called Anna “Frenchie” when she was a war refugee 
just months off the boat to Ellis Island 
when the newspaper article mocked her foreign accent 
for reader entertainment 

Most didn’t notice that she spoke French and German 
and her fledgling English with a Flemish accent 
but she could understand the crude French remarks 
when thees boys followed her from the grocery store 

a chance for them to test their foreign wisecracks
—acquired in the Great War?—
on an easy target, the pretty little French girl 
who helped get them arrested 

Barely twenty she testified in court 
pointing a damning finger 
and the one named Clark B. was ordered to pay 
a ten-dollar fine for spoken indecencies 

because she had passed for French in her new country 
My auburn-haired song-bird-of-passage 
Grand-mère at the banks 
of the rising Mississippi 

*Notes:

1. Epigraph is by Dr. Mary McAuliffe, Director of Gender Studies Program at University College Dublin, as quoted in an article by Ed O’Loughlin in The New York Times after the killing of 23-year-old Ashling Murphy, “‘She Was Just Going for a Run’: Anger in Ireland Over Teacher’s Murder” (20 January 2022); link retrieved on 9 December 2024:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/world/europe/ireland-ashling-murphy-murder.html

2. Italicized phrases within the poem are from a Davenport, Iowa newspaper, circa 1920.

Mary Ann Crowe

is a writer, activist, and artist, who moved to Santa Fe (O’gha Po’oge/White Shell Water Place), New Mexico to recuperate from debilitating illness. Her essays, art installations, and public art projects have addressed gender, the environment, war, and gun violence. Poems appear in After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and Art; The Ekphrastic Review; Flying South; Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders; Writing in a Woman’s Voice; and elsewhere. In 2023, her poem “Missing Daughters of Chicagoua” was a Finalist for the Mary Blinn Poetry Prize, and won the Fischer Prize for Poetry.

A Barnard College graduate who was born in Munich, Ms. Crowe has also lived in and between Germany, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Puerto Rico.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Missing Daughters of Chicagoua, Finalist for Mary Blinn Poetry Prize, in After Hours (Issue 46, Summer 2023)

⚡ War Child Lament 2020 in Writing in a Woman’s Voice (28 February 2023); first published as a poetry prize winner in the 2020 Pasatiempo Writing Contest