October 2024
Bio Note: These short poems are from my eighth and ninth collections of poetry, published in the spring of 2024: "Theft" was included in If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions); "A Distance" was included in my chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart). Each of these poems gives a bit of a sense of the tenor of the book from which they come. I'm looking forward to the publication of my memoir-in-essays-and-poems, Apartness, in early 2025, by Inlandia Books.
Theft
My burning hip,
your aching neck,
my creaky knee,
your tender spine.
Now we sleep,
avoiding pain,
at outposts
of our spacious bed—
each wrapped in ancient
loneliness.
Once we drowsed
curled close as pups, your arm
clasped tight around
my waist, or face-
to-face, breathing
each other’s breath.
Originally published in Offcourse.
A Distance
There was a hum, once, in my childhood,
a muffled recitative, a trembling—foregrounded
against my city’s steady din—the sound
of praying twice a day in the Orthodox
synagogue we never attended, just next door.
I imagined the aleph bet my grandpa
tried to teach me (when I was four,
before he died): those Hebrew letters of fire
rising into the air, becoming white vapor, curling under
the raised window sash into my fifth floor bedroom,
and into my ears. I learned most of the tunes,
as if by osmosis, without trying.
Now—a lifetime and a continent away—
at home alone during the Days of Awe,
I listen over and over as Barbra Streisand
sings Avinu Malkeinu—climbing the cage
of notes, settling back in sorrow
and hope, ascending again, higher,
even higher, until my spine shivers
with the pleading the music speaks,
and the tones, about to self-transcend,
to burst on soundless wings, hush,
fold into themselves. I could learn to long
for anything encoded in such sounds.
Originally published in Offcourse
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