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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The Chanukah Collection

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Day 8:

π‘Šπ‘’ 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑙𝑑 π‘‘β„Žπ‘–π‘  π‘€π‘–π‘‘β„Ž π‘œπ‘’π‘Ÿ β„Žπ‘Žπ‘›π‘‘π‘  π‘Žπ‘›π‘‘ π‘“π‘œπ‘Ÿπ‘”π‘’π‘‘ 𝑖𝑑 π‘€π‘–π‘‘β„Ž π‘œπ‘’π‘Ÿ π‘ π‘œπ‘’π‘™π‘  π‘Žπ‘›π‘‘ π‘‘β„Žπ‘Žπ‘‘’𝑠 π‘€β„Žπ‘’π‘Ÿπ‘’ π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘“π‘–π‘Ÿπ‘’ π‘π‘œπ‘šπ‘’π‘  π‘“π‘Ÿπ‘œπ‘š, π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘™π‘–π‘”β„Žπ‘‘ π‘π‘’β„Žπ‘–π‘›π‘‘ π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘šπ‘’π‘šπ‘œπ‘Ÿπ‘–π‘’π‘ .

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 is beauty in the scars, my darling. You cannot live well and emerge unscathed.



Day 6:

What does it mean to rededicate something? It was blemished, broken? We got it wrong along the way. If it wasn’t for the debasing, we wouldn’t need a re-dedication at all. Is Chanukah a second chance as well as a new beginning? Is it a thousand second chances? For the days when you’re just subtly off, two paces behind and running to catch up with yourself. Missed the light, missed the call, said just the right thing into the silence on the other end of the phone. Perhaps we all carry a hundred missed moments, scarred and tarnished fragments of the things that mean the most to us.

Perhaps, sometimes, sometimes, they are more beautiful in the way they are put back together. Not a second chance, but a re-creation. A mosaic, all the more profound for the extra pieces, forged from clay and stone and happy endings, diamonds and dirt and I-love-yous and memories. Perhaps we are always adding, changing. Rededicating. Things aren’t meant to stay the same. When you love something, when you stay, you are part of the way it changes. This is Chanukah. This is adding a new candle each day, a new piece, a new memory, and lighting the flame.


Day 5:

What can you hear in a flame?
𝐼 π‘€π‘œπ‘›’𝑑 𝑙𝑒𝑑 π‘¦π‘œπ‘’ π‘“π‘Žπ‘™π‘™.
πΏπ‘œπ‘£π‘’, π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘—π‘œπ‘’π‘Ÿπ‘›π‘’π‘¦ 𝑖𝑠 π‘π‘’π‘Žπ‘’π‘‘π‘–π‘“π‘’π‘™.
Chanukah is our safety net. A parent saying to a child, you are not alone. Wander, travel, stray. It might take a while. (Has it been two thousand years?) Pick up the phone, place the call. Light the candle. This is the moment where we meet, this is the place where I’ve met you all my life. In the flame. Because all of us, we stopped to light a candle here.


Day 4:

It is a time for being bold and fighting beside miracles.

Day 3:

Homemade vodka for dinner,
Don’t you know we danced on the fountain that night?
Lighting candles in jars we drank olive shots from.
We built this together, wearing cement and spray paint to prove it.
Run with us sometime.
Two hundred people came by and forged this moment among us, building with their songs.


Day 2:

We connect through fire.




Day 1:

What is Chanukah, really? It is the darkest time of the year, the onset of winter. It is saying to each other, “Be brave, for on this darkest night I will stand beside you.” Isn’t that what G-d has said to us for generations? Tonight the darkness is our partner, we are made of fire. Within it, we can join together and forge our new beginnings.

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