Posts

Showing posts from April, 2020

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Windstorm

-
I had a dream the other night that explained my mind to me. In the absence of an answer I roam the streets at night, mourning all the things I miss. In the dream it was windy; I must have wandered as far as the river. I do that on occasion. But in this dream the wind picked up, and I laughed at the notion that it was strong enough to lift me. It’s an old childhood fear, being swept off by the wind. But it did grow strong enough, pulling my feet from beneath me. And even as I reached for the doorway of the nearest building – Chase Bank, if you must know it – even as my fingers brushed against the glass, I laughed at the adventure of it. This would make a clever story. But the wind picked up, sweeping broken beams and wreckage, and the Bank was sealed beneath the lockdown as everything else still is. The wind swept me sideways, one hand still gripping to the handle of the bank – black plastic – the other clinging to the cracks in concrete pavement. Holding on by my nails and the st...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sedalia

-
This morning I missed a call from Sedalia. There is nothing in Sedalia, I only know it at all because I broke down there, when the train hit a stone. Sedalia is part of a story. It is a red-brick Amtrak kiosk and an hour on the tracks with $3 ketchup packets, and a wonderful view of the countryside. This morning I dreamed of Tempe. Of a house where I stayed for all of seven hours. Long enough to sleep, to run. To see Arizona’s deserts under a full sun, and a sky so blue it made me dizzy to look at. That was the day I left home. The day I put on corporate clothes and walked into an office with three suitcases and two backpacks beside my presentation, before flying from Phoenix to Philly at two in the morning. It’s funny how life works. Perhaps this is the great do-over everyone always asks for. The lamenting one does at the end of a lifetime, I should have done this-and-that, should have danced on that rooftop and looked into your eyes and eaten those chocolates with rum in the middle. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Taste of Heartbreak

-
Today I learned the taste of heartbreak. I learned to calm myself down at two in the morning, when it’s too dark to tell if the pain in my chest is infection or disease or just the wilder emotions that don’t sit well with silence. We don’t talk about the things we miss. That is the first rule. We can say how strange things are, to fill the gap in conversations. If you mention how fast it fell, how quickly it all changed and spiraled beyond recognition, you are walking a tightrope. You’ll receive slanted looks – what you can see of them from above the masks. But you cannot talk about what used to be. I always break this rule. The first to laugh at the distance, to stare wistfully past windows. I am the first to chase down memories, all the way down to the pier, or the old shul, or the plaza. I keep finding things I lost in the strangest places. The electric bill was just under the coffee coaster. At the bottom of my bag, the pants I don’t remember packing. So I keep wondering if the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Messages of Glass

-
Anything I write today would just be heartsick. Even if all I wrote was the answer to her text message. Perhaps the world fell apart at my hands and I am holding on to fragments. Perhaps I'm choking on my own heart. Holding on by my nails and the tips of my fingers as the shards of it all dig into my skin. It happened today, you know. I cut my hand on a yartzheit candle – the ones used to bring light and warmth to a holiday, but that are also used to commemorate the dead. Darling, I lost it long ago. Perhaps things were made with room to fall apart. Made with space to learn to cook alone, in the dark, because the city shut the lights off but it will still be shabbos. Am I sugar-coating if I say I am still looking for it? That I sometimes find meaning in the sky and a smile and the depths of your words … and that I sometimes scrape it up, with the dust and glass and all, from my knees on the kitchen floor? I know there is beauty in the way we rise. Strength in the things we br...
Post a Comment
Read more

Banana Bread and Chaos

-
Do you also feel as though the world broke down around us? I found brown sugar in the freezer and want to bake family recipes. I want to fucking dance barefoot on the rooftops. I want to host a meal and just invite everybody. It is funny how we gained and lost time all at once. Both at the same time. I am counting down the days with no inkling of what day it is. And for once in my life wonder if my words aren’t strong enough. But they have to be. Because if I sit still, I can feel the fabric of the world again. It is turbulent, and shifty, but there is a rhythm to it underneath the chaos. I don’t know why I decided to see what was possible at 2 in the morning. Too restless to sleep, because it was raining. So instead I learned that laughter is defiant. I learned I still know how to fly, even if I dream of falling. Don’t cry, my love.
Post a Comment
Read more

Cherry Tree Memories

-
We are scraping together some weird form of existence. I still find boarding passes in my bags. Travel food – tuna and peanuts and plastic spoons, condiment packets from six different airports and napkins neatly folded from once-vibrant coffee kiosks. If it wasn’t for Passover, I couldn’t bring myself to toss them. Here, all the notes from my last presentation. There, a calendar, completely irrelevant. A poem, a prayer, a request from a stranger, a month that hid away a year. Who decides what it essential? Who molds together something coherent and practical from the madness that remains behind it all? It is the grown women, barefoot, in the cherry trees. I am thoroughly convinced of this. I tried it myself this morning, I ran barefoot through the grass and pulled blossoms from my clothing the way I once pulled gypsum fragments. The artist-turned-maskmaker, forging hand-woven work for strangers. Phone trees and shared memories and elders gathering bouquets down beside the rive...
Post a Comment
Read more