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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Cherry Tree Memories

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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 river.

Teach me your smile. Your soul, your regrets, the love that your eyes hid. We’ll pass time back and forth between us. Measure moments by our heartbeats. You see, those things are still consistent, in a world that churned around us, that literally vibrates less from all the chaos and the silence.

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