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First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Hero

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I'm still searching for the ones who believe living feels like fire, Too busy saving the world to fold laundry A fucking hero complex that carried us far enough into this mess to get through it, Or so I tell myself. But I only see ghosts in dreams, and I forgot to ask them If they would also like to join our congregational dinners, Instead of just our prayer circles To save my mother’s life. So I haunt their cemeteries reading poetry I wrote, and letters that my mother wrote them. Dear G-d, A friend asked me yesterday how you like your coffee, when you and I hang out like this. I never thought to ask. Because everyone is put together until the moment that they aren’t. So I pray, and burn the eggs, and wonder why everything I do is a public affair For just a little while longer. Scraping the secrets of the world from rush-hour license plates Certain I can do better. And beyond the gorgeous, brutal landscape where I once taught children to fight in the snow Beyond validation stolen f...
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Fruit Trees

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I stepped into my father’s shop “Are you Steve’s daughter?”   I don’t remember the last time someone asked me that, if I was my father’s daughter. If I had a place in this place I’d done nothing to make  –  and a tab with the cashier for the caffeinated drinks – because my father built it. Steve’s daughter came here all the time. She usually chose Mentos.   She helped her mother with the fish and frozen dinners, because chemo rendered her unable to touch the cold.   I walked past our old house. It must have been years since I walked past our old house. The fruit trees were real trees now, oranges spread out all across the lawn. The folks inside didn’t think twice about a woman in tall cowboy boots walking past their house. They didn’t know I once climbed onto that roof to run from a rabbi. They didn’t know I planted those fruit trees. -- When I was five years old, our teachers sat us in a circle and taught us to sing.   They didn’t know those songs would on...
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Every Beautiful Thing

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Are you prepared for Rosh Hashanah this year? Less than I ever was. This year I stand before you in the throes of everything I did not have time to fix, and somehow scared of everything. This year I return home covered in construction dust. This year I stand before you exactly as I am. The ceiling is still broken, exposing all the wires and rubble. I had hoped, by Rosh Hashanah, the ceiling would be fixed. I had hoped a lot of things would be neatly tidied up, and I would not have to relearn to tie the ribbon of my nicest dress while sweeping up the shards of things. There are special prayers that we say for healing. For years I said these prayers with specific names, friends or friends of friends or requests from strangers. Now I say them with my mother’s name. Every single time. Here is a story about my mother’s diagnosis. My siblings and I all travelled home for her birthday, converging in Houston from three separate cities. She fell, my father told us. What do you mean she ...
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My Mother's Eyes

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I’m sitting in the windowsill because this tastes like travel coffee, like the kind I used to drink right out on the fire escape of those Chinatown hotels, and I don’t know where I’m going. -- She teaches self-defense? A client, perusing my website. I remember when I took the photo she is looking at; I was teaching in a park and I’d smeared mud across my face on purpose, two bold lines in defiance of all that the pandemic was. But she’s so small. In response, my friend smiles. Look at her eyes. -- I am back in New York. A letter to a rabbi I did not intend to write. Pages upon pages, scrawled in the back corner of his cemetery. They must be quite familiar with the things that people ask for here, sitting in this room. A box of tissues placed right beside the pens. Pots of coffee down the hall. Someone must have known. My mother wrote a letter once, for her mother who is buried in this cemetery also. It explained the diagnosis. What would she say to us? I read her letter at ...
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A Single Word

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I never believed in writing letters to dead rabbis. Didn’t need another man to pray on my behalf. Well, I’ll write him a hundred letters. I’m believing in everything. I go through the refrigerator, this is two weeks old, that can’t be good anymore after all this time. So much damn time. I made that meal the day she was diagnosed. Years. I count on my fingers to know how many years it was, how long sliced bananas sat on the shelf, and when I last made mushroom stir-fry. The day my father called and said that she has cancer. That was three days ago. How long were the last three days. So I got in my car. At some point I must have ended up in New York. Missed the exit for the George Washington bridge and just watched the planes take off. Stared up at the sky and looked G-d in the eyes. Don’t you dare. And all the others, they must have figured out something I haven’t figured out yet. When they tell me to drink water, or pack lunch for the layover, or go to work. The airport in Atlant...
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Breaststroke

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I know you don’t know me. I know I don’t look like you. I suppose, every once in a while, amidst the black hats and long coats and sheitel-wearing-women, there is someone who doesn’t look like you. My sleeves are rolled up, on purpose. My skirt is too short, on purpose. My grandma would be proud. You’re sorry, today you don’t have a map of the graves. It’s alright, I remember. I walk off on my own, a left at the end of the narrow white road. An oasis in the middle of congested New York. It’s hot today. Strange, my father always said that graveyards were peaceful, but I’d never understood what he meant until this moment. Until I built a life of getting dressed while driving with a sandwich is my pocket, late before I’d left, one moment, too much. Time doesn’t matter here. The emails I forgot to send or the errands I have yet to run, they all stand still in the sunlight. I’d been here before as a little girl (I’d cried and left a letter on my grandma’s headstone, the way children do)...
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