Alicia Ostriker
By Alicia Ostriker
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Culture POEM: Lag B’Omer
And at home in these wasted paradises after the invasion and the raising of the flag and Cain after the ousting of one dictator and the installing of another the carcasses will be gnawed white – Kwame Dawes Thirty-three days after we left Egypt, the manna started dropping from heaven. It lay on the ground…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Naming the Thirst’
when we are born thirst makes us cry thirst surges through our arteries when the hormones hit when we start to wither our thirst actually increases for the tongue of touch the dictionary of rain we remember we were once loved it was love that kept us alive ** Then every face was like the…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Ghazal: The Minimum Wage, 2014’
Having dinner before the president’s state of the union address My beloved produces a rant on the topic of raising the minimum wage He fumes as he has fumed on more than one occasion it would be fucking good for the economy, raising the minimum wage only he does not use this language. We are…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Zohar’
In the Shining Book it says Moses existed before he existed at first above in the spirit world and then among us like a light * child of the Blessed Holy One who is a man of war and child of the Blessed Holy One the glamorous moon divine mother and lover, that had to…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won (A study in pronouns)’
He defied his dad and got beat up He worked for the gang and got shot They wished for war and the war came She sassed her mom and got the ice treatment We murdered the whales and our mother is furious They wished for war and the war came You falsified the data and…
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Culture Bound for Social Contention
Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative By Yael S. Feldman Stanford University Press, 440 pages, $60 ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So said William Faulkner in his “Requiem for a Nun.” If proof of this statement is needed, the history of Israel — where events thousands of years old…
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