There is a particular kind of home that announces itself before you’ve crossed the threshold — you feel it in the light spilling from the windows, in the sound of voices layered over one another, in the sense that whoever walks through the door will be folded in without question. Donna and Gershom Spruijt’s home in Los Angeles was that kind of home. I was lucky enough to be held there myself: to sit at their table, to be surrounded by the many people who seemed to orbit them — friends, family, kehila, and strangers who became friends within the hour — and to understand, almost immediately, that what made the rooms feel so alive was not the art on the walls or the poems in the drawer, but the two people who had built a life together out of warmth freely given.
The walls were full of Gershom’s stunningly beautiful paintings, with all of their immediacy and depth— color, exactness and reflection that seemed to have bypassed thought altogether and gone straight for feeling. And Donna’s poems, which I encountered first on the poetry stage at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the USC campus where I was a grad student and Donna was a professor in the psychology department, carried a different register of the same gift: an attention that it could only have come from someone who had spent a lifetime learning how to look closely at the world and at the people in it.
Gershom died suddenly two years ago. The poems gathered in this issue are, in part, an elegy — for him, for the particular life the two of them built, for a marriage and a partnership that ran for decades and then, without warning, did not. Grief moves through these poems the way it moves through a house that still holds someone’s things: unpredictably, in waves, catching on small objects. But what strikes me most, reading Donna’s recent work alongside Gershom’s paintings, is that these poems are not only about loss. They are still, remarkably, poems of a life — still curious, still tender, still capable of astonishment. Donna has kept making beautiful things in the wake of the thing that broke her world open, and that continuation feels like its own kind of testimony to what she and Gershom built together.
The Cusp of You
I wander the house—switch off
lights even when I need them—
It’s true I crave darkness—but
I can’t replace the bulbs
when they flicker, burn out—
they are beyond my reach.
You were so tall—now
just these flowers—
nearly glowing
as they enter
their death process—
Concave Here are the marks that your loss has left— the undisturbed place on the bed beside me the half-full dishwasher the empty chair at the breakfast table these end-stopped lines. I balk against the term ‘loss’—the “I’m so sorry for your loss.” But I am beginning to see the wisdom of the trope— from the deep cave of my tangled sheets—from this, my heart, how she goes around everywhere—holding up her cupped palms.
Ring in the Rubble —after Psalm 132 I went to your still unmarked grave last week—I want to tell you how peaceful it is there— To ascend from the rubble that your passing has left me, the Psalmist says remember the promises made— Although I know the peril—I follow the paths of memory, wander them—find your wedding ring—slip it on—too big but warm to the touch, and in my still fitful sleep, I reach for it as if I had always worn it. You—restless body, bustling mind—you always came home—and I am still here— alone in our home, cluttered with you—things I can still touch—and yet—sometimes the weave of the gauze between worlds loosens—thins out— and your finger is as much in this ring as my own warm,—and disorienting—
I Catch Myself in the Mirror
late at night in this city
that was once my home—
and I recognize the girl—the woman
I used to be—that I still am—
‘Hey,’ I say—‘I see you.’
But in the morning
she’s gone.
I pull out my familiar
widow stories—by now
well-rehearsed.
I’ve got the repertoire
down pat.
I can turn on the widow doll
at will—leave her
unattended while my spirit
does other work.
‘You’re so strong’
people say to me—
‘You’re doing so well.’
What I am doing
is performative.
I’ve spent my life
performing on various stages.
Now I can’t tell what’s underneath—
Maybe nothing at all. 
When My Screen Says “Set Up Autopay” I Read “Autopsy” because this poem is not about credit card fraud. On the day you died, our daughter was across the country, arguing mightily over the phone with our rabbi, she had come immediately, was sitting at your place at the table—holding forth on why autopsy is not the Jewish way. My daughter won—she is formidable. Now, a year later, I am at a residency—an old house with its steep staircase holding me in the middle of silence—I am exploring the differences between loneliness and alone-ness. When I want to answer my friend’s sad message with I hope you are holding up, my phone chooses: I hope you are holing up…
Before
What are we to do with all these years? Those
that are behind us—those that lay ahead?
Could we travel
the thin places
between then & now—
& after now?
& I’m beside you—even when I can’t
read in between your lines—when our bodies
spin slow or click fast—why wait
for death? She will come
in her own good time—
in her high fashion—red platform heels
flawless & her sweet perfume.
The Young Widow Asks: My name on the papers, your ghost on the couch— isn’t this still our home— no matter what the new deed says? I eat on schedule—strict with myself—my only hungers are for touch—and answers. I roam the rooms making lists. Here’s what I don’t understand without you, things that were ‘your’ domain: how to set the Nest thermostats—how to use the three remote controls for the one audio system— how to turn off the water main —how to sleep through the night.
Tuneless Whistling
Your students come to pay homage,
and I tell them stories of you—
afraid that I am losing pieces of you
in the telling.
Yesterday, I thought I heard you—breathing—
somewhere deep inside the house—
it frightened me, I am ashamed to say—
I put it out of my mind—didn’t listen.
I know I don’t get to summon—
my work is to wait —hold myself
open until —pay the toll.
On the bad days, tuneless whistling, overheard
on the dog walk—nettles, annoys me—
people ask how I am doing
—maybe mention you—
—I freeze inside— I need and need—then
the self-loathing settles in—does this dishonor you?
Today I promise I am listening for you. 
Donna Spruijt-Metz’s books include To Phrase a Prayer for Peace (2025, Wildhouse Press), General Release from the Beginning of the World, And Scuttle My Balloon (with Flower Conroy), and Wu Wei Eats an Egg (Lucas Hirsch in translation). Her poems have appeared in Poem-a-day, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She’s an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, former classical flutist, and briefly, a rock and roll bassist. She gets restless.
Gershom Spruijt (1962-2024) was born in the Netherlands and lived for many years in Amsterdam. From his years observing the old Amsterdam canals and visiting the fine Dutch art from the Golden Age, he developed the idea that the 1960’s were perhaps not superior to the 1690s. After getting his PhD in Psychology and Epidemiology at the University of Amsterdam, he moved to Los Angeles to study sculpture and later painting at Otis College of Art and Design. At the Art Center College of Design, he taught classes on imagination and on the neuropsychology of perception. He also taught drawing and composition and rendering in oil paint. He lectured locally and internationally on perception and imagination and lived with his wife, daughter and two dogs in Los Angeles. His Dutch name, Robertus Spruijt, was hard to pronounce for English speakers. He preferred his Hebrew name, Gershom, and that’s how he signed his work. Just Gershom.
I'm not sure I have enough of the right kinds of words to describe the effect on me of Donna Spruit-Metz's exquisite poems. They hush me to silence even as they speak to the universal feelings we all share in our losses of those we love, however that loss comes about. This is another edition I will hold onto, so that I can re-read these poems.
Gershom Spruit: what an extraordinary talent, how heartbreaking that he is no longer here to paint the beauty our world sorely needs.
Oh my goodness. Your review, Donna’s poems and Gershom’s paintings - a masterpiece. Thanks to you and thanks to Donna for her vulnerability and productivity in this hallowed time.