each one rational, like God, so much God today falling in silence, looking like dust.
Elizabeth Poliner’s books include the poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands (David Robert Books), a Beltway Poetry Quarterly Best Book selection for 2015, and the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Little, Brown & Co.), winner of the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction and finalist for the Ribalow Prize for Jewish fiction. A new novel, Spinning at the Edges, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, Ilanot Review, Vita Poetica, and many other journals.
Featured image in this post: Canal at Voorburg, Holland by Charles Paul Gruppé, Charles Paul Gruppé, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
You Will Not Replace Us
“White nationalists have a new slogan: ‘You Will Not Replace Us.’” -The Forward
You’re probably right; your bootsoles will press into other greens; your cheap torches will burn other nights. Like a person caught in mirrors, you repeat yourselves, sharp lines off into the distance.
But what about how you won’t replace us, either? We who letter our signs and then come together tight, to ring you, to lock you down? In the veins of cities there will be bodies and there will be antibodies. And people—this is unbearable— die from moments like this. Each of us hoping it’s the other side—
—I do hope it’s you. Honestly, I want us not even to replace you but to dismantle you, leave you as parts in the shed. You want us dead, or shipped far away. I want for you infertility and rust; I want to bury you somewhere you can’t be remembered.
Instead it’s going to be the same: you’ll turn up in another street, barking like a dog. Us ringing, the chain that is always coming for you.
Asking for Something
Certain requests come back return-to-sender, like the ones for world peace or the end of hunger; Your silence there Your way of saying This is a you problem. And so, when I set out a chair for You, I usually don’t ask for the world-sweeping gesture, reversal of the human tide; from my chair I just ask if sometimes You can hold my suffering for me. Or if You could keep an eye on my joy. Between Us waits a small white bowl, porcelain—or sometimes it’s a bucket, dented but watertight. Either way, I ask You for what’s possible: if I can decant me into this vessel when I’m brimming over. That, yes— and also, if You could, when I’m ready—even if I don’t know that I am—pour it all back into me.
I’m the author of the poetry collections We Were the People Who Moved (Tebot Bach, winner of the Patricia Bibby Prize), Some Unimaginable Animal (Orison Books), and What’s Left to Us by Evening (Orison Books). I’m also the author of a non-fiction guide to the creative process called the Artist’s Torah, three short story collections, and three novels. My books have won such awards as the Drue Heinz Prize and the Juniper Prize, among others. I have a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in writing from Vermont College, and I teach creative writing at Georgetown University. You can find out more, if you like, at davidebenbach.com.
Featured image in this post: Song Jade-like Bluish White Porcelain Bowl (9958262555), Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
#bringthemhome Israel, January 2024
How soothing to hear high flirtatious notes in the pre-dawn instead of rumbling jets and the boom of artillery. I wake early again to an endless October morning. It is going to rain. It is raining. It may not rain. The blackbird takes flight marking the known distance between us, so close to the dark, underground terror he could lead you home in pure song.
Survival On volunteering at the Beer Sheva Midbarium
When the war starts, I am bereft: both sons in uniform and an unbearable depression.
The animals need to eat. With a large number of staff unable to work, I get a call: please help us.
Leaving the safety of my home, I drive the empty streets to the zoo.
Roni is cleaving a frozen white rabbit for the cheetah when I enter the kitchen.
Emily is with me. She’s from my hometown. We slice rats, fillet fish, and hack chickens. We laugh with an unexpected intensity. Her son is in the army, too.
We muddle through the “recipe” book, trying to understand how each bird likes their food and the amount by weight they should receive.
Pelicans swallow large fish whole in one gulp. Cormorants prefer small sardines. The diminutive red falcons need their chicks chopped.
It is a relief to cut vegetables and fruit for the ducks and chickens, unlikely residents of the zoo who have arrived in poor condition from the destroyed kibbutzim, along with rabbits and goats.
We hear the thump thump of artillery less than 30 miles down the road, the incessant noise of planes taking off from the nearby base. We take a walk along the lonely paths on our way back to the car, the blue sky empty of projectiles. The giraffes walk towards us as if they are deprived of company, their dark almond eyes and feathery lashes inquisitive.
I am rooted to this moment of dust and sun and clicking hooves where the zoo could be enough if I could let the heat hold me womb-like in this bright zenith of survival.
Notes to an Unborn Grandchild “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” ~David Ben Gurion
Tomorrow I will tell you my story of arriving in this ancient Land where dust storms rage for days and winter rains bring fertility. I will wake the dawn with my song, collect ripe lemons that have fallen on our porch and sweep the dust from our stone floors. The wind will die down, laundry will stay on the line. Almond trees will don white dresses and we will picnic on a blanket of wild anemones. Rivers will flow with abandon, slips of fluttering prayers will be answered, your great-grandmother will remember everything, and I will know the world with you in it.
An award-winning poet and author of The Lost Kitchen: Reflections and Recipes from an Alzheimer’s Caregiver (Black Opal Books, 2019), Miriam is a freelance writer passionate about telling stories. Miriam’s writing has been published in several journals, including Guideposts Magazine and Daily Devotionals, Red Wolf Journal, Poet Lore, The Prose Poem Project, Ilanot Review, The Barefoot Review, and Poetica Magazine. Miriam loves to read, cook, and take long walks when she’s not writing.
Featured image in this post: Processing salmon fish meat, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Can I Hold Both? A Two Voice Poem on the Current War by Jessica Genia Simon
An Israeli Father to His Dead Son Boker tov, ben sheli (Good morning, my son) said the father to his son. The gravestone, quiet in its repose stands at attention nonetheless. The father says, Dudi, hello, your parents are waiting for you at home. The conversation is over for today.
A Palestinian Father and His Dead Daughter Is there an inch of Gaza that is not a cemetery? There is no stone uncracked for the gravestone, no inch unbombed for a grave. A father stands in a bombed out doorway remembering his daughter on pink roller skates before shrapnel sliced her throat. Now, there is no door, no girl, no grave.
A Walk Across Campus as a “Jew in Solitude” by Jessica Genia Simon 2004 -2024
“What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? – Adrienne Rich, “Yom Kippur 1984”
I could not tell Adrienne how not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own. Back in 2004, I squeezed a honey packet onto a bitten dorm cafeteria apple to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). An article about dead Israelis and Palestinians stuffed in my backpack a prayer on my lips mouthed into a shared bathroom mirror, Kol Nid ray ay hummed on Erev Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).
Now, splashed across front pages campus protesters gather some wear keffiyehs, some kippot they’re arrested, silenced, suspended.
There is no space for the student who lives in the in-between, weeping all losses, all lives on a college campus that contracts like an aortic valve shut tight. Blood can only pump to this chamber or that chamber.
I hope they find (like I did, twenty years ago during another war) other misfits to bicker with to make clumsy like love to on a dorm room twin bed someone they can wave to common threads like tassels in the wind.
For the Jewish Queers by Jessica Genia Simon
Yes, it’s true. I am a Jew, and proud to be a queer one. because if you ask me about identity, don’t expect to hear just one. Jewish heritage I feel lucky, unlucky, lucky to have. something my mother is, my father is, my grandparents were, something my mother’s mother suffered; six, seven siblings gone, without a trace, not a picture left of a face. I am Jewish because I am a student of history, I have grandparents who survived to create my mother for me,
Queer Jew, the connection is not so hard to find. read Paragraph 175; the queers were among the first to die, along with the communists, the mentally ill, the blind. They came for so many others before they came for the Jews Nazis did not care about identities you did or didn’t choose And this is as much a part of me as much as desire for whoever attracts me. So you cannot ask me to pick one, or ditch one; I don’t have that luxury.
Why am I a Jewish queer? So on my 26th birthday, I could read Leviticus 18:22 in the biblical Hebrew and explain to you that in the language of its writing the word abomination has a connotation of ritual deviation not condemnation, and that the translation is an interpretation the interpretation is a conversation because the same word is used twenty-six times in the five books of Moses and also applies to eating lobster, but you don’t see picket lines of signs that read “God hates lobster eaters.”
What is to lose and what is to save? Destroy a language and culture to make a slave. Kill the babes, arrest the resistance and pass the blame. And so goes humanity, culture, language then the soul. When there is nothing that survives; there is no story to be told. I sought wisdom and grew reverence for any things that survived. Any text that made it through the history of time we call civilized. Whether a Dead Sea scroll or a Hasidic story re-told This is the revenge over those who seek to eliminate a people whole.
Truth grows deeper than the seed of a root of a word or a family tree. I won’t walk away from a whole history because some parts offend me, I will learn them like lyrics, then switch up the rhymes and the melody. Teacher didn’t tell you? Interpretation is not blasphemy; it’s necessity.
Jessica Genia Simon began writing poetry at age seven. Her poems have been published in many journals including the Atlanta Review and Super Stoked: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from the Capturing Fire Slam & Summit.
She earned a B.A. in English and Textual Studies and Policy Studies at Syracuse University, where she hosted poetry slams and workshops on and off campus. Upon graduation, she joined Teach for America and taught High School English in North Philadelphia while earning her M.S. in Education from University of Pennsylvania. Then, she spent a year in Jerusalem, Israel studying Bible, Mishnah, Talmud at Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, while volunteering with LGBTQ+ and middle east peace organizations.
She works at a gun violence prevention nonprofit in D.C. and lives with her wife and daughter in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her first poetry collection Built of All I Shape and Name is available now from Kelsay Books at kelsaybooks.com. The poem “Even After” in this collection was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Featured image in this post: 2024 Columbia pro-Palestine protest 23, SWinxy, Columbia University, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Amazon is sold out of sackcloth By Jen Gubitz
I’m sitting on Noah’s ark. He let me board early. After the animals come on safely, I bring my loved ones, too, into the rooms of my heart as the sky pours out her tears.
Evan is sitting shiva. Rachael tells me her body is in Kishinev. Daniel is feeling alone in this storm. Jodie is searching for words, she finds songs to briefly calm her soul. Abbey’s great aunt, her cousins are held hostage. We ordered our sackcloth on Amazon, But they’ve run out.
From the River to the Sea, a cousin posts on Instagram. A middle school friend who once brought me to Easter services with liturgy blaming Jews for Jesus’ death Facebook messages me about collective punishment. Neil from high school emails me after 20 years to tell me he is thinking of me. Joe from our childhood West Sherwood Terrace texts me about his grief.
My beloved, born of the land, first needs quiet, to process, to worry. His cousins are called up. They are my cousins, too, now. We love you, I message them repeatedly, as we cancel our El Al flights for November.
What about the kids in war, my nieces ask? They hide, the eldest says. They hide behind their mommies, the youngest agrees. I call my dad crying. I cry dancing the horah at Sasha’s wedding. I cry for Abbey’s Carmela and Noya. I cry because I do not understand war and I do not understand hurting children.
I cannot sleep on this ark. I should not sleep on this ark. As if the last night of summer camp, I am sitting shmira. The WiFi is too strong and I am up late each night. Refresh, refresh, refresh. I am keeping watch to make sure everyone is safe. I am sitting shmira – Guarding the memories of the dead until they are returned to their families embrace.
You can’t sit shmira for all of them alone, my sister tells me. You have to share the burden.
So, please come on board this ark with me, There is only one skylight And it feels so dark.
What if Shammai was right? By Jen Gubitz
What if Each night We go to light And there is more darkness in our hearts Than the night before?
What if we are not like Hillel cannot see the light increase Cannot strike the match Or have run out of wax and wick?
What if the wickedness Of the world Or the pain in our soul Casts dark shadows On the glimmering lights?
What if the miracle Is the single flickering flame On the last night While the world Tries to snuff you out?
Rabbi Jen Gubitz is the founder of Modern JewISH Couples which supports couples on the pathway to marriage and beyond, and runs the BMitzvah Program at Temple Shalom of Newton. Her welcoming vibe weaves learning, ritual and lifecycle experiences full of music, poetry, honesty and Humor.
Gubitz is a graduate of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (NY ‘12) where she was a Tisch Fellow and wrote her thesis on Jewish death education for children. She completed an MBA-level entrepreneurship program through Columbia Business School and Glean Network and an intensive certificate in Family Therapy with Therapy Training Boston. She directed the Riverway Project in Boston from 2016-2021.
She is the co-host of the OMfG Podcast: Jewish Wisdom for Unprecedented Times and her writing appears in the LA Times, Boston Globe, Romper, Lilith Magazine, OnBeing, and the Jewish Daily Forward. Learn more here: www.jengubitz.com
Image: Moshe Ganbash – Shiviti – Google Art Project, Moshe Ganbash, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
