You grow very sleepy. / Then, like a breached ship / on a darkening sea, / you slip out of sight.
teach me to hold truth between my teeth / like a hard lump of Russian sugar, / suck in the sweetness of integrity / with every sip of strong black tea (Jewish poetry)
Every day she must locate herself, / as her neighbors need not who can lean on a world of words. / Poetry is a land she must not enter / is she is to keep her abandonment complete. (Jewish poetry)
We ask for bread and are not / satisfied. We ask for stone / and sand runs through our fingers. (Jewish poetry)
That’s how it is with my kind: our own body betrays us / our own tongue turns us in to the authorities. (Jewish poetry)
1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
there is // rushing wind at my ears and feet / as the ceiling glides above me. (Jewish poetry)
yet sometimes a child’s song, key to something / that is not, surely not, nothing, as after Patroklos is speared. (Jewish poetry)
So why had she made such a fuss in the first place? Plus weren’t they both growing old? Surely, a dribble here or there shouldn’t seem such a big deal. (fiction)
In the old language / we told the best stories of your life, / and for the first time in my life / I felt I really understood you.
(Jewish poetry)
