Poetry
& nothing at first / you think no / the tea too sweet / the click of teeth in any aching the azaleas’ archery in bloom / what means do to lolling men / stay just so / as if the air ain’t mete / with expectation humming heavy we / say night might hang […]
Mordekhai fed and sustained. Really?! Indeed, Rabbi Yudan said, “One time, he went repeatedly to all the wet-nurses but could not find one for Esther at this moment, and so he nursed her himself.” Rabbi Berakhiah and Rabbi Abbahu [said] in Rabbi El’azar’s name, “Milk came to him and he would nurse her.” —Bereshit Rabbah […]
After Hannah Gamble There were shells stuck to my feet each time I went inside. If it wasn’t January I was kicking my sheets off. Crying, I gave my boyfriend a blowjob. You can stop if you want he said, but I didn’t. In the margins of a bio textbook someone scribbled unsuitable jokes. Three women walk into a bar, began my father’s friend, […]
In August, spider lilies burst through a yard. Open-jawed bulbs, hot-cherry, their long legs reach for me. Once, not far from here, I danced a ballet variation in their color. Nights I rehearsed with my tutu bleeding through the studio windows, shining into the abysmal lot in which, somewhere, my father watched in his car. Who noticed me? Contorting […]
After Abraham’s Offering, 1635 by Rembrandt Isaac, masked by the calloused hand forcing his head back, can sense little but the hand’s warmth, its pressure, its scent of figs or olives or flax— plus the blunt stab of firewood at his back. Perhaps a dry breeze, the sun’s warmth, the chirps of scrub warblers. His body looks relaxed: legs unbound yet folded […]
We make our bed by the river, thick with lupine, silt-tongued and wanting each other’s slick heat despite the fever running through your currents, your fresh scars lit up from within. One afternoon in the downy sunlight we rescue a duckling tumbling through the red water, rudderless as a clam. We bed it in a box of Trivial Pursuit softened by washcloths atop […]
Our mother wrote her will on one translucent slice of ham. It was a Sunday, early winter. The sun was wheezing in the sky. She smelled like rat traps, I remember. When she sat me and my brother down, her smile was thinner than her hair. She slid the ham across the table, then—told us […]