While Waitressing at the Kosher Restaurant A Man Calls Me A Whore and a Woman Rushes Behind Me into the Kitchen to Hand Me Her Baby
Every season is good for killing girls,
the seaweed-black night foaming
with stars—
a plaque of women’s names.
Before Mary’s a whore,
a baby is placed in the frozen bird
of her lap, the dignity in being.
Every place that hurts you
is the season where the sun bursts
like salmon on fire. Think
of Eve shivering naked beneath the alder
watching God get angry—
is it anger or is it grief—all of us doing
what we’ve been trained to do.
The Women Gather at Biala River at Night
Light sheds its skin in the poplars,
Earth’s soldiers wielding the dark, bats emerging
like machinery along the branches, a trick of the eyes,
and still the river is a cantor, singing.
Once, in a holy city, all around me the women wept,
craning their perfumed necks,
hooked fish eyes swelling in birdless light.
Once, blood glimmered on the rocks here
in meager testimony. Not here, but inside here,
within the cities within a story, soft framework
where loneliness flowers. Here, I go to the women, take
forgiveness from their hands, drill
the bullet-sized hole in my head to receive
the light in its endless repetition.
Once, light brushed the hair of my dead aunts as they bent
to kiss their siddurs on the other side of the drought.
How their bodies grew wet as eels gathering
underneath a sentence, mouthing gibberish,
an engine refusing to shut off, and inside,
what God will do when I die.