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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Thank G-d for Glitter

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Can I touch you? Can I hold you? Is it still forbidden?

I found some glitter on my face from Purim and laughed until I cried. Are we all living in such a state of unease, to be brought to tears by a fleck of glitter? By the memories of a prayer? It is both at once these days. Laughing and crying are the same damn thing to me.

I roam the streets at night at wonder where the world went. Tangled in the little lights illuminating vacant tables by garden restaurants? In the footprints on an empty plaza? They closed the Avenue, did you know that? Even the parts we built.

Well, I found the miracles I was searching for this morning. They were hidden in the cherry trees.

Thank G-d for the wedding. Thank G-d for whipped cream with bourbon. Thank G-d my friend got a job two days before they closed the hiring offices.

Thank G-d for glitter, the herpes of the artistic world.

With all that you have, guard the spark in your eyes. That is my request. Guard it close and hold it. For the adult couple blowing bubbles on the stoop. For the old man with his dog. For me. That is what the wounded world needs now, millions of sparks.

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