Wandering Fighter

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Showing posts from 2023

First Grade

- February 08, 2023

“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...

Hero

- January 25, 2023

I'm still searching for the ones who believe living feels like fire, Too busy saving the world to fold laundry A fucking hero complex that carried us far enough into this mess to get through it, Or so I tell myself. But I only see ghosts in dreams, and I forgot to ask them If they would also like to join our congregational dinners, Instead of just our prayer circles To save my mother’s life. So I haunt their cemeteries reading poetry I wrote, and letters that my mother wrote them. Dear G-d, A friend asked me yesterday how you like your coffee, when you and I hang out like this. I never thought to ask. Because everyone is put together until the moment that they aren’t. So I pray, and burn the eggs, and wonder why everything I do is a public affair For just a little while longer. Scraping the secrets of the world from rush-hour license plates Certain I can do better. And beyond the gorgeous, brutal landscape where I once taught children to fight in the snow Beyond validation stolen f...

Fruit Trees

- January 03, 2023

I stepped into my father’s shop “Are you Steve’s daughter?” I don’t remember the last time someone asked me that, if I was my father’s daughter. If I had a place in this place I’d done nothing to make – and a tab with the cashier for the caffeinated drinks – because my father built it. Steve’s daughter came here all the time. She usually chose Mentos. She helped her mother with the fish and frozen dinners, because chemo rendered her unable to touch the cold. I walked past our old house. It must have been years since I walked past our old house. The fruit trees were real trees now, oranges spread out all across the lawn. The folks inside didn’t think twice about a woman in tall cowboy boots walking past their house. They didn’t know I once climbed onto that roof to run from a rabbi. They didn’t know I planted those fruit trees. -- When I was five years old, our teachers sat us in a circle and taught us to sing. They didn’t know those songs would on...