bellied gaps in these gasps are filled moon-bright sweet
as I crinkle under my grasp on body is spilling over into
light and light this heat-felted choir collages me into nothing
and I tuck my corners in alone find joy like ecstasy like body
as it comes into itself and breathes open into pieces like supple glass
cascades from my mouth to my chest falls and falls convex to canyon as
light rains down in chords written by hand written by mouth can I put
my mouth on song and shake (it) to its end I have found the full moment
when the choir breaks into a thousand notes and they cry to the wall
and cling in open-mouthed wonder that our bodies can make
that my body just made I am seething in sound me full-voiced
Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her work explores diasporic memory and transmission, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual in colonial Mexico City. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews alongside the poet's own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and is grounded in the language and myth of the Talmud. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, and Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. She is currently a poet-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM.
