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Showing posts from December, 2019

First Grade

“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...

The Chanukah Collection

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Day 8: 𝑊𝑒 𝑏𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑢𝑟 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠. Today we sang for the wounded as we welcomed a baby. Their names were whispered inside the same breath we sang hers with, hand-written on a page placed beside our decorations. How is there space for both within one heart, within these walls? We built them together, we know what they hold. Tools and chairs and coffee cups nestled in the bookshelves. Scrolls and cinnamon. A knife, a name, a new beginning? All at once? Today they did. There is space in a song for all these things in one moment. Is there space in our hearts for all the things that our songs say? To survive, there has to be. We speak laughter that is laced with echoes of the past, music so joyous that it bleeds. It’s aright if the song is broken. Just hold my hand and sing for me. Day 7: There ...