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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Fruit Trees

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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.

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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 one day be lifelines, sung from the depths of a pandemic, or a synagogue function, or a hospital room. They didn’t know those little lyrics could hold everything at once, from an airline to a child’s smile to the chemo drip behind a beige curtain. 

The nurse smiles at me. “Don’t you want your own tablet?” 

I didn’t want my own tablet, on my own chair across the room. I was just fine where I was, curled up between the bed and all that medical equipment, watching a movie with my mom.

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“Sunday,” I tell my mother when she asks the dates for my next trip. “January 17.”

“I think January 17 is a Tuesday, or something.” 

She said that as casually as I’d said it was Sunday, or something. But of course she knew. She knows when the Tuesdays are. 

Tuesdays are chemo days. I’ve seen her calendar through March; it revolves around avoiding Tuesdays.

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Being here is like stepping back into a memory. One that runs beside a muddy bayou on a winding street that hasn’t changed in fifteen years now. So I walk along that road – past the house where Martha’s lived as long as I’ve known her, where Benny’s kids somehow grew up enough to have babies of their own, and the bayou keeps right on rolling – and I wonder what would happen if I could somehow speak to those versions of ourselves that chose to do things different. 

Like when I finally left. Like when I stayed away a too long. 

Or when the taxi driver asks about my husband, certain any husband would be intimidated because I know how to fight.

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And my mom, texting my siblings from the hospital to remind them to wear coats.

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And me, standing naked in front of the mirror, examining everything.

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When I was five years old, our teachers sat us in a circle and taught us to sing.

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