Do you also
stumble over sidewalk cracks?
Hopscotch along
skewed pathways,
diagonal lines—
your heel grazing raised tree roots,
your toes curling over indents of pebbles,
groundwork lodging
into your sneaker soles?
Do you also
mind your steps,
teeter at stop signs?
Do you carry with you
a crown of leaves
when you come back home?
You said to write
when the seasons change,
to let the forward motion
unsettle my words.
Let the phrases
which sunbathed
across the tree outside
my bedroom window
crinkle between their thinning leaves,
be swallowed by fragility.
Study the birds
that nested between its branches,
write how they rush
to distant summers,
their flight casting coolness
my bedroom floor
and the poems that lay there.
You said to write
when summer rubs shoulders
with shorter days,
to let my words chafe
between their mingling.
Maybe the air,
brittle as it is,
can carry my verses to you,
like wings
can haul bodies
to trees, somewhere,
with more promise of flourishing
in the days, months to come.
On shallow evenings, your lover takes
to chafing dried oil off
old roasting trays,
scraping dirt lodged
like clay between floor tiles
with her pinky nail.
On all fours,
her joints click in the
rigor of her cleansing.
Your lover takes
to retying sneaker laces
for a proper loop,
over and under and knotted,
not right,
takes to stepping outside
and stepping back in—
the crickets too resonant,
they jeer at her emptiness.
A sectional half lit.
A foreign film on mute.
An album has ended.
A father’s voice needles the shallowness.
In her mind,
he nestles into his armchair,
scoffs at the hollow space
and recites bible stories
she knows by word.
An hour of silhouettes:
It’s leaves like sponged paint
pressed against clean linen—
branches brushed with ebony
in a heavy hand,
and dusted with amber streetlight—
trunks like wet pastels swept sideways,
soaking into sleeping mulch.
This hour is its own shadow,
itself and its outline.
A tree’s roots lengthen
behind the drying oils
of these minutes.
When the candle wax over this morning cools,
I hope it fastens all as it is, now.
I hope it stiffens over still countertops
and stool legs, over dinner dishes
stacked like a house of cards—
the towel underneath already dry
from soapy droplets. It caught and drank
while we slept in separate beds,
turned in our sweat
a floor above.
I hope wax crusts over the dimness,
settles the quiet grey
dusting our floor tiles,
a peaceful coating,
like powdered sugar
sprinkled on Ima’s french toast—
a sweet, mindful spread.
Can you imagine a morning
embalmed in this mold,
hushed like a wasp in amber,
its stinger idle, trapped by film?
Now, sun thaws our window panes,
rumbles of a lawnmower
shake the cast of our light sleep.
Our vents can try to maintain this stillness
only if doors remain closed.
Sidewalks crinkle from rainstorms
in Jersey,
ridge between suburban valleys
and cave under flood-lines,
like my Savta’s fingers
pruned from three generations
of kneading dough
and scrubbing baby scalps
under the drip drip
of a shower head
that never fully ceased its flow.
This path darkens
under trunk-form shadows
like my Saba’s shoulders
after tending to his lemon tree,
glistens like his watered eye
downcast, strolling home
from the neighborhood shul,
Shabbat brimming his lashes.
He carries his prayers
to his wife’s dinner table.
Cobbles weld in my under-sight,
eyes set on the stop sign
at the end of the road.
Pebbles, silent and stable,
and there, like sand from the yam
grinding my shoe’s laces,
dragged into the sliding doors
of Ben-Gurion, outbound.
Is it a poem
or a silver platter
I feel in my back pocket
when the land grows still,
the red eye of the sky
slowly dimming over smoking frontiers?
Like clouds,
I build people from window sills—
fill in sketchpads of their panes
with Monday nights.
Prints of tennis tournaments
suspend from fridge magnets,
notes for filo dough
fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang—
the recipe, a family heirloom;
the cork, left behind by the home’s
previous owners.
Faces eclipse
across channels of the glass.
I step,
study a perspective painting—
Feather lines
fringe a single mother’s eyes
because Jeopardy skips
on her ex-husband’s TV box—
faulty cable from a man of faults—
and unpopped kernels fumble
between her buttered fingers,
lodge between stitches
of a faux Persian,
also from a past love.
Upstairs, a page
from a child’s coloring book.
A baby wriggles in a bassinet
between dreams
of her mother’s heartbeat
and a father’s Sunday humming,
too young to draw lines
between memory and imagining.
A house of drawings
strung up by cedar boards
on Blue Hill Street—
existence in outlines,
like an artist’s sketchbook
flipped open by the wind.
Your form looks seasoned
from the endline.
Your streaks faded
where winter has fouled you,
squeezed and stretched your leather,
tugged at your jersey
while the rest of us
spent halftime behind a closed garage.
Benched, you inhaled and held for a season,
retired by the base of the hoop.
You wheeze a sluggish breath,
air leaving you in whistles.
Neglectful months
have rendered you unfit.
Can you lift from the sideline?
Train the draft from your core?
Polish court grime from the
creases of your rubber,
repaint your patterns
and roll into hands worthy of traveling?
Sneakers squeak near you,
toe the boundary line—
an afternoon dribble before
it gets too hot to play
with shoes on.
See, the way your shadow
stretches across the court,
taut, perfectly whole.
Guns become soundless
when their ringing
is omnipresent,
when their bullets
are metronomic,
when their tragedy
tastes prosthetic,
grieved in phrases
between sips
of morning coffee,
lukewarm on our tongue.
Their sounds
were shrill with virus
long before our illness
forced us to listen.
We think we know
quarantine
when bodies
have been
in lockdown
for so long,
their chokehold is
an army knot
strung into the polyester
of our legacy,
their gasps
gusts of air
behind claps
of a waving flag.
I have reached the back cover
of my journal, blackened three
yellow legal pads, I’ve soiled
dinner plates with my dreams,
self-published my poem in the
blank pages of The Bluest Eye.
I have taken to my basement
walls to chart my meditations,
the branches of my imagining.