POEM: ‘Gaza’
Scrawny goats limp on heaps of rubble, the sea — under weights of sorrow. Nowhere to go, she says, escaping the bombs with her wounded child. And the child guarded by ten silent angels who weep.
Poetry
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Backseat Mama’
my son consigns me to a knife-less table-setting he explains: “mama doesn’t get a knife, she sat in the backseat” — in the car — it’s true: my husband at the wheel, his mother, visiting from revolution-ravaged Ukraine at his side I’m the only one small enough (even post-birth) to fit between two carseats surprisingly…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Paste-Up’
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘The Great Dying’
He gathered his friend’s dead flesh, walked back and sat in a field reciting a psalm. Kneeling, he signaled the signs of courage and defeat with his bloody fingers, each sign for each heart beat before the great dying. An instinctive act, he ruminates. He sounds the psalm like a warning bell, befuddled by what…
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The Schmooze A Delirious Interpretation of the Binding of Isaac for Yom Kippur
Writing of Kafka’s tales, Walter Benjamin pointed out that Kafka’s tangled meanings “do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of Halakah… they raise a mighty paw against it.” Benjamin, ultimately, juxtaposed the Jewish law (halachah) with mythic storytelling (aggadah), envisioning the rise of the latter…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘You Think This May Be How It Happens’
You’re sitting in an armchair, it’s your favorite, though beat up from years of use, and there is a tear in the fabric covering the seat cushion, and it’s after noon, and you’re taking your nap, and you wake up and ask your daughter if anyone is there, you feel as if someone has been…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Neighbors’
If only I’d climb over the fence and step into my neighbor’s grove of almonds, stealthily put my ear against his window listening closely to Farid and his oud, and think of his ancestors as mine, and remember him coming from Mecca with his green flag for my son’s birth, if only we’d sit together…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘BRUJA’
From “Salome Libretto” Through the fercockte gawk-stalkin’ hack stackers of antiquity trickery lexically-licked sticky flickering Salomé, you are bringing in the big guns Opening the sluice gates with your hyper dramatic excess Flexed with swishy riffs, pithy spiff grifters Like a shattered chatter box schadenshow like a discordant accordion like manna from mayhem you are…
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