Two poems from Body of Knowledge | forthcoming in The End
I misread Kristina. She sat across the room from me the first evening of an intermediate Hebrew class held in central Jerusalem, just off the pedestrian thoroughfare of Ben Yehuda. Because she was blonde and European—from Austria—I guessed she was an activist or journalist who spent significant time in the West Bank, someone who traveled frequently between Jerusalem and Ramallah, who might have monitored checkpoints or shepherded Palestinian kids to school or watched as Palestinian farmers worked their land close to Israeli settlements.
She described the bond she had with her animals, the horses especially. The work was relentless, morning to night, yet she wouldn’t have chosen anything else. Not everyone could understand or respect a life spent among animals.
From A Series | 128 Lit
Low vibrations, cello music. / ….running from the cops in every dream…
I had experienced how easy it was for someone to get too close, to cross a line, to touch me so it hurt. I saw now it was easy to do. They did it because they could; they understood it was easy to do, so they did. Most people didn’t see this, how easy it was, but now I did. I saw it, too.
Across the road is a meadow, an abandoned barn, a pine forest. And a memorial. Bad things happened here in 1914, 1942, 1952, and nothing since.
Watching the Wim Wenders film with Mary when we were twenty-two and in Berkeley – / “Those lights!” Mary said, and I felt them, too.
My heart clenched / shut, and I felt those around me / do the same.
“Praise the Mutilated World” | Apofenie
Bodies that might go to a protest or get buried in a mass grave, who might give birth twelve stories above the streets of Manhattan, or in the mud of a refugee camp.
This violence I imagined / came from within // came from the him in me / and also came from me.
I no longer have the dream / where I am forced // to commit murder, slice a dog / in half, reassure its trembling // fur, its anxious eyes that I will do it clean, by running a // sharp knife fast along its length.
She told him / “throat” / rhymed with / “horseman.”
the bar / where I got a necklace / signed Ruthless, where a / man dreamed of trailing / a leaf down my ribs.
Silent street, cinematic every time / a car, a motorcycle / someone in sharp / heels.
I’ll never wake up here again.
“Waking Up Marie” | Catapult
“It’s just how it always was – when we were growing up. Yeah, I idolized her back then, still kind of do, but I just dislike her so much, you know? She’s a bad person.”
I wonder how many of them are fascists or former Vichy collaborators, but the question and its answer don’t trouble me, just pass through my mind as I walk up Rue de la Republique, toward the place in front of the Palais des Papes, where there are always skinny, stray dogs who whine in front of cafés or lope off to dark alleys.