Monthly Archives: September 2021

Don’t Tell Me: A Theology


Forced to Sunday school
head down in the back row
I played hangman with Betsy Zeff
and during services with a choir of women 
my brother and I ran 
back and forth in the hallway
snuck out to 711 for candy
forbidden at home.

Moses called to God in the Tent of Meeting
and what’s left
flattened bread, charoset, moror, karpas
bitter Passover table reminders.

My grandmother came from Poland to Brooklyn
wore her cousin’s short trousers
hair in a bob, Yiddish in her voice
other languages left behind
Polish, Russian, and Ruthanian,
her autograph book signed by teenagers 
who wrote they would not see each other 
for a long time.

I didn’t know how to listen
to my father’s reverse sentences
symptom of his parent’s Yiddish
and too late, I didn’t know 
the Old Testament would show me the glue 
holding us together. After he died
Mom and I sat in an auditorium
reading the same prayerbook as our temple’s
same rising and falling
minor key familiar around my shoulders.

My theology is mixed together with cousins found
my mother preparing the family tree
mixed with my mother and I arguing  
without Dad to break in
salad half prepared on the counter
as I walked narrow pathways.

I’ve been trying to remember some details 
since Mom died
the shape of her lips, overbite, heavy eyebrows
and how like a crow 
she said my name
the O more round
thrusting her whole body into it.
For we need to remember the details 
and what we’ve been handed
to know what to follow.

Like Moses’ sister Miriam, I’m older to my brother
and unlike her I resist showing the way
even as I demand my rights.

No prayers will save me
and I have no veil.
I can only tell the story of Jacob, journeying 
to make amends
and how I implored Mom
to include his story in her brief Haggadah.

Is it inevitable that Jews must leave?
Can one track and be tracked?
What’s seen in absence
filters through sheer curtains,
echoes through all the borders.

Laurel Benjamin holds an MFA from Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, California Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Poetry and Places, Global Quarantine Museum Pendemics issue, Silver Burch Press, including honorable mention in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poetry Contest 2017 and 2020, long-listed in Sunspot Literary Journal’s long list, among others.She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. More of her work can be found at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com

Reunion in Nowy Dwór, 2019


For three hundred years, some of us stood watch
over the bodies, then bones of your Jewish ancestors.
For three hundred years, we watched the people
who came to visit them, relatives and friends 
from our town, from Warsaw, and places even further
away. We watched them leave small stones atop us
pebbles of covenant and remembrance they kissed
with cold lips and fingers raw from sorrow and wind.

For three hundred years, by the elbowed shores 
of the Vistula and Narew, we weathered storms
sunned and faded, shared our landed border with 
our Gentile neighbors, divided by only a fence that 
did nothing to keep the essences of graveyard flowers 
away. We stared either forward or up, our faces
heritage proud, carved with life songs and stories
of the beloveds below us, with biblical passages
and poetries of blessing of the one God.

And then came the onset of the second great war
and the invasion of our home, the Nazi soldiers
who tore us away to lie and crumble under roads
who ground the bodies and bones of our blesséd 
into asphalt that bore the treads of tanks near the 
tracks of trains that would take their descendants
to Auschwitz to serve, to starve until it was their time 

for gas. And for seventy years we lived in hiding
blinded and buried in dirt and mud, under the crushing 
weight of human tamping in a town where not even one 
Jew of the thousands remained. We were so erased 
from memory, no one knew we were there.

Then in 1988, two sons of two survivors bought our cemetery
home back, emptied it of rubble and waste, erected a fence 
for its protection. In a short miracle, twelve of our eight hundred 
headstones were found, and under pressure from the Christian
populace of Poland, road excavations unearthed over one hundred 
more. And now along a pavered plaza, on two high cement walls
we hang as one community, as resurrected symbols of resilience
our edges are rough and crumbling, some of our faces barely there. 

Townspeople continue to find us, under sidewalks and playgrounds
and they bring us to this new home built on our original resting place.
They lean us against the locked gate to wait for the memorial
caretakers to carry us inside. Some of us come in pieces and wait
in careful piles for wholeness. Behind us, on triangled pages of black
granite, the names of the vanished are incised, four thousand Jews
who inhabited the houses, who ran the businesses in what became
a ghetto prison walled in wood. And when the winds blow in from

Auschwitz, they carry the ash of the ancestors of our visitors
who gather each year in early June to visit our stones, to find
new or forgotten family. And they each bring a stone from 
their homeland, many from Israel, to continue to honor 
the covenant and community their everlasting God made first 
with Moses and then with Joshua and always with the unvanquished
Jews, His chosen people not to be forgotten.

Nancy Himel spent 30 years teaching high school English in the hood near Los Angeles before she retired in August, 2019. Prairie Schooner published one of her poems in 2007, and now that she is a full-time poet, she is hoping more of her work will be published soon. She lives in Tucson, Arizona where she is working on a memoir-in-verse, tentatively titled From Ruach’s Cradle.

Notre Dame
 
Long before it burned, my father
and I leaned against each other
in the pews, down coats blanketing
our laps, a camera strapped across
his chest, dim winter glow
through the stained glass. Two
jet-lagged Jews in Notre Dame.
Dark wood, dark evening creeping
along the Seine, fading midafternoon
into impressionist night. I closed
my eyes, my lids weighted by vaulted
ceilings and all those crosses weeping.
I was thirteen, budding into myself,
prickly and torn. When I woke,
an hour long past, my father
snored softly into the final hours
of visitation. We were untouched,
nothing stolen or misplaced, not
even a glove. We collected
ourselves and wondered how long
we had dreamt. 

Eve Kagan is a trauma-informed therapist, educator, and theatre-artist. Her poetry is forthcoming in Eunoia Review; her personal essays and short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including HuffPost, Role Reboot, Mothering through the Darkness, and Dark City Lights. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Somewhere There Is Hunger, Somewhere, Fear			
	─ a cento 

All she had to eat was snow 						 
glad to be swallowed completely. 					
Onions and grease, lumber and bleach, she opened			
with no unstoppable weeping. 					

This is followed by ninety beats of silence				
shimmering in the shock						
mounding the slender bodies as the sun blazed			
skin almost transparent, almost familiar.				

Out ahead, an envoy, blatant and exposed				
in candlelight, this hermit praying					
Break me like bread. Take me						
the gnarled scars, flesh lumped like redwood burl.			

Death is feeding elsewhere tonight					
Curses will pour back into mouths.					
The white flurry of spring sweeps in					
just as a rust-red shadow slides across the moon			
leveling the ground again						
breaking down the blood-clotted					
and a lone naked root is searching for soil.				

In the staggering universe						
you could crack the sky like lightning					
each moment plump and separate as a raindrop			
a thousand torch songs crying out, an exaltation of larks		
drenched in rapture, the angel glistening.				

Two years of hiding, so calm, so dignified, so just.			
We don’t speak. We just wait, alive together.			
What the story doesn’t tell is how to go on,				
what a swan becomes.


All lines borrowed from poems by Ellen Bass. 

Nancy Himel spent 30 years teaching high school English in the hood near Los Angeles before she retired in August, 2019. Prairie Schooner published one of her poems in 2007, and now that she is a full-time poet, she is hoping more of her work will be published soon. She lives in Tucson, Arizona where she is working on a memoir-in-verse, tentatively titled From Ruach’s Cradle.

SCREENSAVER
                       
I have a screensaver
of the earth revolving in space,
a fragile ozone halo
 
our only protection but
some really think there’s a god
out there looking down.
 
Now if that space is infinite
and he made it,
that places him beyond infinity.
                       
How long did it take to create time?
Doesn’t bear thinking about,
my dad says, drinking his decaf

as we sit on this tiny degenerate
rock, in need of salvation.
 

John Short has a degree in comparative religion from Leeds University and a diploma in creative writing from Liverpool University. He’s published a pamphlet Unknown Territory (Black Light Engine Room) and a full collection Those Ghosts (Beaten Track Publishing) and blogs sporadically at Tsarkoverse.

Prayer Shawl


At the crest of the mountain 
a penitent in open prayer, 
kneeling, weeping, raising his arms, 
and not a single bird.
The winter rain has erased 
all the footprints of good weather 
visitors, and will mine.
Below a woman runs, 
her breath visible in short puffs, 
then disappears. How long 
I have worn this mountain.

Jeff Burt works in mental health and lives in Santa Cruz County, California with his wife. He has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Heartwood, Red Wolf Journal, and Your Daily Poem.

Weightless, we’re soaring


The wind will exonerate
just as it scatters

side lined by seashore, we
are wrapped in a whisper.

silver wing troubadours
saluting the infinite 

eluding the wave towers
we break dance the time zone.

Sand sanctioned figurines
scribblings from finger art

drawing our heart house
inflating our flat lines.

Let's toast the wind tonight
as it siphons our shadow,

forsaken of obstacles
weightless, we're soaring

When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting and birding. She volunteers in animal rescue, helping to tend to a cat colony in the neighborhood. She lives by a beach town, which provides much of the inspiration for her art. Her latest collection of poetry is “On the whims of the crosscurrents,” published by Red Wolf Editions. 

Atomic 

									
It’s a reasonable question,
one good friends 
usually get around to:
“How do you envision God?”

You reply, on the phone, 
before we flit to another 
and another subject:
“I think of it as Jupiter’s 
gravitational pull, or
the way atoms can be split 
and then split again, infinitely.  
It’s in there somewhere…”

And then we are talking 
about a woman on the bus, 
or food, or politics, 
and I come to understand.
I can let God be the space 
between diminishing matter.
The solution 
that holds us together
between discussions, 
between words.

Our conversations are volcanic.  
Each idea erupts into being
for consideration and review
and hovers atmospheric
until it diminishes
dwindles really 
and sputters out.

The rising market, 
the decline in music. 
Art, culture, God.
These subjects compose 
our existence, our trajectory 
together.  Each topic beautiful 
and whole, as we divide 
and display them to each other.  
We are forever seeking purpose,
solace.  As if the answers lie
waiting between our words.
But to share a definition, 
a specific vision,
that seems a lot to ask.
Nothing to hold 
in the palm of my hand
just the flaming fragments 
of your infinite mind
fluttering to Earth
like stars.

Melody Wilson writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and The Shore. Upcoming work will be in Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, Timberline Review, and SWWIM. She has recently been awarded the 2021 Kay Snow Poetry Award and is Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award.

 
Spiders                                   
 
On the thread of 
this attempted prayer
a hair braced attentively 
 
I lower down,
the slightest give 
a catch only the heart 
 
can feel, and think 
of spiders, 
their secret spinnerets,
 
how these September days
when opening 
the greenhouse door
 
I’ve walked face first 
into a web 
no one could know 
 
was there except 
the crumpled maker. 
I’ve spun nothing 
 
and hang in nothing, 
my thread invisible unless 
glossed by light, 
 
lowering down into air,
or what is not air 
but the belief of it. 
 
 
 

Kathryn Simmonds has published two collections of poems. She lives with her family in Norwich. 

The Tone


Why claim the name of poetry?
These codes, sounds, sights to be received -
unless my self-indulgent phase
is barren laid, no progeny?
By printer’s ink I want eroteme,
not to end line myself alone -
or I would speak from mindful couch.
If all else fail to find such task,
then how will they, I, benefit -
for why community of souls,
wisdom I sole recipient?
So face the stave, some audience,
remove the megalomania,
the monologue with self alone -
allow reaction set the tone;
it’s said that twelve can change the world -
eleven if the silver paid.

Penny dreadful, classic tome,
nouveau cuisine or greasy spoon,
the lingue franca, koine Greek,
I pose a drip-fed, question marks,
like parables that rubbed wrong way,
insulted those, established ways,
who knew which side their Lord was on,
happy to confirm that God their own,
that they affirmed what He had done -
until the upstart seeded doubt
for those not wearing Sabbath best,
for wrestlers, could not let it rest.
Treatise prose persuades so few;
it is the story, changed world-view
that knocks perspective, paradigm
and dares the daring to review.

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had over 250 pieces published by online poetry sites, including Amethyst Review, printed journals and anthologies.  https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/