baby: in bassinet, breathing loud, me: on the couch breasts filling up, heavy with milk toddler’s sweater thrown over his chair, on the floor: toys, a towel, a Ziploc bag on the ottoman: blue-and-white polka-dotted boppy — a nursing pillow on the sofa: baby-wearing wrap outside: the rain, in the dining corner: shades are still…
You are captives of illusion, experts in eluding truth, you party, drink wine, pick anemone in spring. Occasionally you are reminded that life is transient as grass, that death lies in ambush among green meadows. Though the wrath of the suicide bomber is daily at your door, your children bask in your warmth, and this…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
