Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
When my sister leaves, she leaves me with a toad. She makes good on a childhood threat. When we were little, she, a round-cheeked angel, and I, older and mean, used to say that when she grew up she would join the army. “No.” I was controlling, even then, fiercely unkind but fiercely protective. “Yes.” she’d insist, and to me this implied she would go…
In a dream, Moses confessesto me that “Everything God saysis a lie,” to which God respondsthrough a porthole of lightin the clouds, “What he says is true.”The paradox thrashes like a flightlessbird in my mouth.All I can say is there is a lessonto be learned from my dog still quivering with sleep on the kitchen floor—He does not question the colorof sunset or perennial ryegrass,nor does…
The kippah clipped to my hairnags like a tag. I don’t come to daven or lean into the ligature of lamedlike a shepherd’s crook,or wrap myself in the birthday-cake blue and white of communal tallit. I don’t come for the finale,either, the last Oseh Shalom,just to say I showed up,shook hands with the Sabbath bride. I come for the faces. En-face or three-quarter profilesof heads, some balding…
Never odd or even, we bear the saint’s confession given over daily as scars mating, we grow in freedom from sin when the music stops, a number he chooses from the cakewalk of us broken boy rhymes in steps fall to take and to be taken by him, to watch the other boys in hostility at the square dance of our relations, our Hialeah fathers…
Her skin seeps like soup.It’s not a perfect Revlon match,Oils jumping toward the waiterFor a glass of water and the entréeHasn’t even arrived to save her.Do you remember your mum’sFirst sweat at fifty, like a tableclothWas being ripped from her shouldersAnd she could not scream,And she was stiller than a smokingChimney? The secret betweenMothers and daughters is thatWe are the same in too many ways,No…