23.05.2023

So the demon is once again on my shoulder

Telling me again and again 

Of the weightless softness of nothingness

And of how,  in fact, 

No matter how wonderful these

Odd compensations

They are still

Compensations, unable ever to be more. 

I'm so tired of hearing

"It will get better", when 

Even when it does, 

It never stays that way. 

Right now, 

My breath itself makes me anxious

I long to put my

Diaphragm to rest

No

Nothing new has happened

There is no fresh injury

This is just the way it is

This is how it has always been.

22.05.2023

Pay attention. 

To now. This moment. 

I promise you

Whatever you're going through

Good, awful, or mundane

One day, if you're lucky enough to still exist

Nostalgia will strike

And you'll try to recapture 

What you were wearing

What you were feeling

What the weather felt like

What slant of light, 

How your father looked, sitting at his desk in his 

Ben Gurion shirt and khaki pants that

No belt could ever hold up 

Above his slender hips

How your mother's students sounded

On their toy- like violins, playing

Variation after variation 

Of "Twinkle"

Which dog, 

Or dogs were alive at that time

What you ate for dinner when you gathered around the 

White formica table that night

After your mom's last students for the day had finally left

Once your father had been a

Woken from his 

Afternoon nap  

And since

We still can't Google 

Our own intimate experiences of things

Pay attention

I promise you

There will come a day you will 

Want to recall 

This now. 

American Road Trip

Sundress n old docs  

Too dark gas station sunglasses with the

Cracked black plastic frames

Cigarette ash flies back in 

Open window wind 

The past year fades with the FM reception

Push in the tape

Let's shoutsing a new song. 

13.04.2023

While you've been away in your

Cool dark grave,

Summer has returned to 

Our Yorkville street: 

The boisterous birds

Crowd the branches of green Gingko

The women walk past in

Sundresses, or shorts

Even the Brownies writing tickets

Have uncovered their arms. 

I have unearthed my

Canvas camp chair,  

Returned to my second floor perch on the catwalk

Unlike me, the 

City barely notices your absence 

One day, my own will be

Just the same. 

28.03.2023 : Brainfog

Murky

Muddy head 

Head of bees buzz

Head of staring– confused 

At my 

Weekly     pill    organiser

(AM or PM,

        Yellow or blue?)

Head of 

Puzzled preparations I've done a million times :

Coffee

Toast

Head of helium and stone

Head of aborted poems

20.03.2023 II

You read to me the words

Of Marina Tzvetaeva

As much for the pleasure their shapes make in your mouth

As the sound of your voice 

Does my ears

But you can understand them: 

A luxury I can't afford

Only can I watch your face

Suffuse with the pleasures 

Of nostalgia

And that alone for me is enough. 

20.03.2023 I

The pleasures of lying naked in bed,

My Hitachi cools from her labours 

     beside me

Late afternoon light 

Through

Dirty white curtains 

Stain blue, 

     white walls

And through open window

     children's voices 

Scrapes of plastic bigwheels 

braking on concrete 

Basketball percussion 

Spring symphony.

17.03.2023

Of all things, it's an image of the roughly woven, off white, textile curtains that hang in what was my father's office, (which used to be the family room) in the Miami house that haunts my thoughts right now; this specific, and unimportant element of nostalgia, that witnessed the daily, evening ritual in the early 80s when we'd gather after dinner on the roughly upholstered couch to watch that day's episode of Guiding Light on the VCR, that- once turned from family recreation space into my father's workspace,  hung silently behind my mother's back on those sleepless nights she'd play Freecell at my father's computer whilst softly listening to Schubert's "Trout" on CD, that witnessed my father's endless frustrations, cursing over computer, after computer, after computer down the years that he could never quite wrangle to his will.. 

Those curtains, like the corners of the produce section in the neighbourhood Winn Dixe I used to visualise on hot, lonely nights when I couldn't sleep in Kfar Habad.. 

When everything is threateningly unfamiliar, it's trivial things– specific and trivial, even mundane things that offer a feeling of safe familiarity.  This is the true lure of nostalgia; because we have already survived the past, and the only thing the future promises, is that we won't.

Meital

Meital shifted her weight on the hard crate and looked at the tall, covered mirror her mother had once stood in front of, shifting her weight from this foot to the other, tugging this piece of her blouse and tucking in that bit; always making sure she was "just so" before walking out the door.  

The neighbours, who weren't Jewish didn't know the customs of shiva, but they did all they could just the same; Mrs Fitzpatrick had brought over pizza the first night, (with pepperoni,) and Steven, the Super had brought up Cadbury chocolate eggs and yellow and pink marshmallow peeps, explaining that his wife had cleaned out the shelves at CVS after Easter, and that "everyone likes sugar!"

Meital agreed and swallowed the eggs like a starving dog once everyone had gone home.

Now,  the sugar craving hit afresh as she sat, alone on the green crate and wished she hadn't finished the chocolate so thoughtlessly the night before.  All that was left was the two packets of peeps. 

"But they're so cute" thought Meital.  "How can I eat something this cute?"

She took a yellow one out of the packet and held it in her hand.  "Ok," she said out loud,  "when I bite into you, you'll be born some place else, but as a real chick!" Meital had played games like this with herself since she was a girl.  It was the only way she could bring herself to eat animal crackers.  She ate the peeps, one after one and sucked the sugar off her sticky fingers. 

"I wish that when we died, we could be born someplace far away but in a different form" she thought. 

On a distant world, a new baby opened her orange eyes for the first time, as vague memories of someone named  Meital quickly faded like a dream.

12.03.2023

You 

Are stone—   stuck

Where throat turns 

To chest;   I

Can neither swallow

Nor cough you up. 

11.03.2023

Unquiet, the yellow sun bursts excitedly through my window, 

Already, in mid-March,

At April's softened slant; 

She beckons me to walk 

Down by the old churchyard

Count the shooting crocuses 

Impatient as adolescence

But I cannot oblige her,  

So, as if in consolation

She sets to fire all of the 

Exuberant flecks of dust 

That dance above my floor

In the cold, late Winter's air.  

06.03.2023

It's bright outside:

The seasonal slant of light has shifted again 

Blue grey, to green gold

Already preparing us for 

Early Spring bulbs to burst 

Through hard ground

I sit sideways by my yellow table, eating 

A crisp, late Winter's apple

The still cool air slips in under the lip of the window that won't quite close

Over the dusty rows of books lined up on my sill,

Like a younger lover, insistent I walk with her down to the river

Perfumed steam from the first floor — someone is doing laundry.

04.03.2023 Vignette 1

"I love other haunted people," she said, pouring our sixth cup of tea, "people who refuse to hide from their own ghosts, I feel like I can trust them."

I nodded and sipped from the small, heavy cup I held unnecessarily in both hands. We'd finished our meal what felt like hours before; the tea had grown strong, and ice cold. Outside, the snow was ankle deep. I asked the visibly impatient waiter for another pot.

28.02.2023

The day my dad died

I ate my breakfast quietly 

No Podcast, nor music

There were no radishes for my tartine 

Afterwards, 

I showered 

Shaved my legs and washed my hair

The day my dad died

There were so many calls to make

The rabbi wanted me to write something up for the funeral

I couldn't remember my parents' anniversary

The afternoon of the day my dad died

I sewed shut the broken zipper on the side of a skirt

Put new laces in

My black shoes

Got the mail

Wrote a grocery list

On the evening of the day my dad died

There would be no seven o'clock

"How was your day?" 

Nor "Did you eat any dinner?"

And no "I love you"s

The day after my dad died

We buried him

I watched it all on zoom

Men respectfully covered his grave 

From a mound of dry, grey soil 

The Rabbi spoke of my dad's smile

Intoned prayers

Bade me tear my clothes

All the while

The dishwasher purposefully hummed from the other room.

An apple core oxidised on the table before me

And outside my window

A few white flakes fell from a 

High, grey sky. 

26.02.2023

The old familiar birds nest of your thin bones

Bones that nursed your cancer— 

Carefully, like eggs, 

Until hatched, it consumed you

Liver and spleen,

Now burst you out from that

Chalky cage. 

25.02.2023

How can I pull the

Warm light of day 

Back into the darkness 

Of these atrophied cells, when

Packed under layers of 

Cold, wet earth

I'm already becoming

Blind like stone?

18.02.2023 ●

 

There is a reason we

Compare grief

To a black hole :

It's so massive

Inescapable

It has a gravity

All its own. 

14.02.2023

"Strong" is a trap. 

"Strong" is a lie.

"Strong" denies the cracks in the foundation. 

Were I a house, I would be condemned, 

Not told how the cracks don't show,

How the clumps of crumbling plaster are "normal" after what I've been through, or worse, 

Don't really matter at all.

I am not strong,

Nor am I weak; I am 

Hollowed out, decayed and infested with the blackest mould crawling up my walls. 

I am imploding;

Sinking into unstable ground.

Demons have taken up residency inside my

Derelict walls.

I decay where I stand; that is, 

When I'm able to stand at all. 

Mostly I sit,

Still as old bricks,

And wait for the earth

To reclaim me.

11.02.2023

Old igneous crumb the earth has coughed up

Adrift in black and airless space

Even the stars were a 

Broken promise

Cold

White and

Beautiful corpses.

My Submission to NYT Modern Love

 

Last month, my beloved partner Carrie passed away while I held her hand after a lifetime of severe illnesses. I buried her two days later on what would have been our 18th anniversary. 

Today, thirty three frought days after I lost my love, I turned 54, and so naturally, shortly after I finished my birthday mug of hot chocolate, I broke down and began quietly sobbing in Max Brenner. 

It wasn't loud or particularly disruptive, but if someone happened to look at me, they'd see that my shoulders were subtly shaking, and while my long hair obscured my face, when the waitress asked if there would be anything else, my voice audibly cracked as I asked for my bill. 

Just across the way at another table, two tourists sat and unabashedly stared while they whispered to one another. Rude! 

Ours is a crowded city. I can't count the number of times I've been in a Duane Reade or Gristede's and some young woman in Uggs (always in Uggs,) was on her phone crying, or fighting with someone, and nobody nearby so much as batted an eye. Why? Because in this crowded city, we understand the need for space, for invisibility. We respect one another by not making one another self conscious, by not bothering one another. This isn't because we don't care; on the contrary, it's because we understand. It's because we share so much: space, culture, fate, needs... 

When tourists come into our communal spaces and contravene our cultural standards it's intrusive. They are the proverbial "ugly Americans", regardless of from where they come.   

So I beg of you non New Yorkers: come enjoy our beautiful city, but learn something about our customs and culture, and please don't treat us locals as spectacles. We're just living our lives, and sometimes, that means we are publicly messy.  

Ignore us. (Except when we're trying to pass you on the sidewalk; then, for God's sake, please, get the hell out of our way. )