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Showing posts from 2021

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 Things I Don't Know

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Today I’m painting poetry from all the things that I don’t know I stole my new beginning a damn long time ago And I’m still learning how the world works. I’m laughing in the face of all the times I got it wrong Praying you’ll forgive me that you told me all along Forging a refuge with my words. I swore I’d build beyond the boundaries that a breaking world can bring But I can’t differentiate, so I just say everything And it’s damn messy. Sometimes that’s just the way I am. I’ll run along the river when I don’t know where to go, Dancing past the footprints that I placed there months before Praying past the things I can’t control. Fighting when that’s all I know. I spent a year collecting memories I don’t know how to hold Second-guessing everything, pretending I was bolder than I am But a broken sword goes both ways. I never listened when they told me. So now I’m building with the shards, of everything I loved the most. And it’s so damn beautiful.
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But in My Heart I'm Jewish

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I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best. But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching. I knew the woman who sat on my bed...
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Some Kind of Human Kindness

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I stood for seven hours in the freezing rain. Perhaps it was dystopian. The clinic would exist for 24 hours, for a vaccine only just approved, because there was an apocalypse and the whole world shut down around us. Six thousand people huddled in the snow that day, with coffees and ponchos and rainboots. Perhaps in another life, we’d sit in some white plastic chair at our nearest pharmacy and be out in twenty minutes. Perhaps by now we’ve all done things we never thought we would. Perhaps even when the whole world ends, people still have coffees with them.   (We were discussing which celebrities we’d stand in that line for. A coffee date with Pink. Perhaps I’d stand in line to have brunch with Lady Gaga. I thought seven hours was more than enough time to make it back by shabbos. Ice water pooled up through our shoes; not even Gaga, at that point. I should have eaten breakfast. At 4pm they told us we’d be there long past nightfall.) I turned to the woman who gave the announcement. W...
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𝐎𝐧 𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐦

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The truth is, I feel like I can’t do Purim this year. I don’t want to. Because Purim, Yom Kippurim, a day like Yom Kippur, a day that is actually the most joyous and sacred and festive of all them, a time for accessing miracles, is for most of us the time when everything starts over. Round 2, a full year completed, but a little less naïve this time. We know what we’re staring through. Perhaps I haven’t lost all of the naivety. I’m still promising Pesach will be the yetzias, like I’ve always been. I’m still harboring some hope that, if it isn’t Simchat Torah, we’ll all dance through Chanukah the way that we once did. I have no patience for dressing up, I am quite content with the glitter I wore last year, thank you. I still find it everywhere – there was some on my pillowcase just last night, in fact, when I was thinking of a choice and wondering if I chose correctly. So perhaps there was something powerful to last year, if I’m still finding glitter because of it. If I found glitter for...
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