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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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A Single Word

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I never believed in writing letters to dead rabbis. Didn’t need another man to pray on my behalf. Well, I’ll write him a hundred letters. I’m believing in everything. I go through the refrigerator, this is two weeks old, that can’t be good anymore after all this time. So much damn time. I made that meal the day she was diagnosed. Years. I count on my fingers to know how many years it was, how long sliced bananas sat on the shelf, and when I last made mushroom stir-fry. The day my father called and said that she has cancer. That was three days ago. How long were the last three days. So I got in my car. At some point I must have ended up in New York. Missed the exit for the George Washington bridge and just watched the planes take off. Stared up at the sky and looked G-d in the eyes. Don’t you dare. And all the others, they must have figured out something I haven’t figured out yet. When they tell me to drink water, or pack lunch for the layover, or go to work. The airport in Atlant...
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Breaststroke

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I know you don’t know me. I know I don’t look like you. I suppose, every once in a while, amidst the black hats and long coats and sheitel-wearing-women, there is someone who doesn’t look like you. My sleeves are rolled up, on purpose. My skirt is too short, on purpose. My grandma would be proud. You’re sorry, today you don’t have a map of the graves. It’s alright, I remember. I walk off on my own, a left at the end of the narrow white road. An oasis in the middle of congested New York. It’s hot today. Strange, my father always said that graveyards were peaceful, but I’d never understood what he meant until this moment. Until I built a life of getting dressed while driving with a sandwich is my pocket, late before I’d left, one moment, too much. Time doesn’t matter here. The emails I forgot to send or the errands I have yet to run, they all stand still in the sunlight. I’d been here before as a little girl (I’d cried and left a letter on my grandma’s headstone, the way children do)...
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Crocus

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I was taught that, on holidays, each of us can access all the power and grandiose beauty of that holiday’s inception, weave it into our personal lives and reap miracles. Any miracles. All of them.   When I wrote this piece, I expected it to be some panicked articulation about what to even do with the grandness of that gift (which is was), that got increasingly more panicky the longer I kept writing (which it definitely did). But at some point the narrative shifted - and I realized I’d begun answering myself. Crocus Dearly beloved religion that was, what were you thinking when you let the world change you? I liked you best the way you were. *** You tell me to change everything. The way I cook, the way I clean. To collectively rework the redemption of my people by burning breadcrumbs on my stovetop and debating with my Jewish neighbors down the block over different brands of bleach. I never understood it. Grant me something grand. An entire nation all captive in one place, re...
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Needles

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I pulled boxes of hamantaschen from my car last night, and stacked them on the kitchen floor. Laughed, because dozens of needles whispered across the tiles. Firs and juniper leaves.  I stepped into my students’ house the other day. Their father was in the room; instinctively he brought his hands to cover his face. I literally don’t care, I told him. He smiled. I’ve known you two years, he said. And I don’t think, in all that time, I’ve ever seen your face. I could pass you at the grocery store and not recognize you. You’ve never seen my face. But you lent me your ladder last year, and access to the evergreens when my shuls needed schach for sukkos. You let my take the hedgers, climb twenty feet high and trim them between classes. Apparently my car is still filled with pine needles. I hope it always will be. I stepped into my student’s house the other day. His mother was in the room, preparing for a yoga lesson. A black cat I didn’t know she had perched on the windowsill, beside the...
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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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