Girl of crumbs and half-closed doors,girl of cuts and suicide notes,your pain is yours but also belongs hereto words we cannot speak.

To prayers left unansweredletters returned unopenedto unfruitful queries—an open-ended waiting.

They linger just beneath the surface,the thought you just thought and weren’tthinking about, the dream you can’t remember,the sentence you left unfinished.

I taught you the English ABCs and the French.In school you learned the Hebrew letters,at home the Swedish ones with the threeweird vowels—å, ä, and ö—at the end.

And the German Umlaut, ü, which was allthe German I thought you should knowalthough it is the language of your grandparents,the first language your father spoke in California.

And it was the language of your great and great--greatgrandparents who disappeared into the white fireof Europe with their names—Edith, Albert, Johanna,Emilia, Augusta, and Siegfried—and with the nameless.

Girl of half-eaten sandwiches, cereal, and leftovers,girl of giggles, emails, phone conversations,you belong here but you also belong there,to places we cannot visit.

Bones mixed with dirt and ashes—all else gone:flesh, blood, hair, lips. Dirt mixed with ashes and bones:eyes, ears, fingers, toes. Ashes mixed with bones and dirt.Know in your pain that pain radiates. Pain migrates.

Beat, beat, rhythm of feet. When did I learn

to look for danger? What’s stolen so easily

lost, but what’s poured into the dark

earth I can’t forget. Tried crawling out

of that space, crawling, calling his name,

but he was already gone. Open the window!

Let me hear! Is the plumbing moaning?

The hot loud 5 AM rooster? People running

barefoot on red dirt? Windows with netting

and bleating goats. My worn sandal lazily

caressing a grey cement floor. Nobody sleeps.

Lentils in red-red sauce waiting on the breakfast

table. I found potatoes, he said gaily, emptying

a sack of yams and cassava on the ground

by the stove where the girls cooked on the open

fire. Cool taste of apples teasing my mouth.

SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY JOURNAL. Issue 23. Spring 2022

Scroll down alphabetically to locate this poem.

Whitethorn spear raised higher than the lilacs, honeysuckle strangling nettles and the bramble, scent so sweet I almost fall into tall grasses wild clover already to my middle. Moss on stones,

steps, doors, trees. Where are the feet? I counted their steps to measure my height. Tall as a tower, taller than salt. Before people can come, I’m no good even for fire. What with the worm, mold, the rot?

I used to fret over the lack of rest, the moving me around just like a tool. But I’m no fool here now in this hibernation. Know I am as useless as this house I’m leaning on.

PUBLISHED IN GREAT LAKES REVIEW

APRIL 21, 2022

This train station is a strange instrument

filled with melodies and silence

although it is never quiet and never still.

We only gather here to leave again,

stealing a quick touch or a long moist hungry

kiss or two desperately hurried tongues

meeting between teeth, bodies pressing

toward each other, feeling gently the sudden

warmth of a throat, a hand on a soft breast

inside a blouse or a jacket, the many I love you-

I owe you-I promise you torn to pieces

like so many hotel receipts tossed in the trash

or out the train window over the sign:

“Do not throw objects out the window.”

But my future is not an object. I claim

both agency and authorship of this line

and the others lined up above and below.

What’s really not here are the missing people

who were rounded up, deported, murdered:

as cold as it is, this was the last normal place

they saw. Our ghosts! How many children

stand abandoned like little rocks?

Gravestones with sadness carved on their faces:

Mom said she would be right back! But mom

was detained or died; she will not return.

Her train took a different direction,

and the child carries the sound of her voice

like a brick until he or she learns how to throw it

in some gutter and find another burden.

The pickpocket next door whistles

like a nightingale at all the wrong times,

and smiles like a seductive snake.

Here you can buy any body of any age and sex

and some that lack both. Curious angels come and go

in the crowd. Once I thought I heard church bells,

but it was just a train that didn’t stop,

not even braking a bit for safety or slowing down

to watch for pedestrians hurrying across the track

or the one determined suicide walking wildly

toward it, half running around the bend

just as the train picked up speed outside town.

We all read about it, not much left,

but they found her earring, small consolation

for her husband who grieved on a distant coast.

She was the exception. Otherwise, this

is a congregation of preludes. The old man,

crippled in the war, sells roses nobody

can afford and says he once saw Jesus Christ,

our most famous Jew, trot up the stairs,

but I didn’t see him ever and don’t really believe it.

The whole place humming like a giant beehive

or a guitar well-strummed by loving skillful hands,

and just like a guitarist leans over the guitar

after a long, good day of playing, so I lean

over the balustrade, close my fists to better feel

the beat of restless feet, the rushing/raking, groaning/

grating, tripping/traipsing, swimming/swaying feet;

time materialized, yet floating through my fingers

like water dripping/draining, brewing/braiding

down the stairs. Am I drowning? Maybe we are

in the belly of G-d giving Him or Her indigestion

so we listen to these constant contractions

and contradictions, the purring of moving bowels

and bodies and buses taking off. We listen and grow deaf.

We listen and wait. We wait and we speak.

We speak, we grow mute and then we start again.

This space cannot fit in our mouths and bellies.

It grows out of our starved poetry lines and drips

onto the tracks and into the earth, feeding it,

fostering a new generation. Maybe we—who all

fear our responsibility to Nineveh and try to run away

—are in the belly of the whale or the belly of the Book.

Three thousand years of memorization, duplication,

and only ten small variants in spite of translations,

interpretations, descriptions rustling around us

like dry leaves dancing between tracks.

Whipped up by passing boots, kids jumping,

soldiers running, dogs peeing, birds pecking,

they swirl to return in a new pattern, always waiting,

always growing, disseminating, nourishing;

the leaping sentence for every hungry mind

hopping off the train onto the platform

grasping for a real face, reaching for pen and paper,

starving for letter and text, counting each step

to the next page, pulling it close to whisper in its ear,

to smell it, kiss it, listen to that huge red heart

pumping its waves toward another horizon, a new

beach, opening space, opening eyes, opening minds

to their absence in this miracle of daily chores we call life.

Maybe the poet has to come here first to question and obey,

for the Word is neither echo nor imitation, neither mirror

nor reflection, not a moon to another’s sun, but a live birth.

Streets too narrow for cars. Potholes gleaming like wine in deep glasses, bags of cement crackling in corners leaking gray tears in the cluttered gutters. Blaring beats wave from one window to the next, chanting with wet shirts and panties, the scent of tobacco —voice rising in pitch, a ladder of sound.

We didn’t hold onto each other or anything coming

up to that old holy place from behind, the man

with the accordian smiled at us even before we

put a coin in his hat. The famous American writer

already drunk in his house with the thousand trees,

his pools, the red-breasted trogon, the red-necked

bulging trody on the fence, a basket of shiny gold

alepidomos mixed with the crafty eels for dinner

escorted by a round-eyed kinkagon. the door

to the synagogue wide open. Smell of rum and salt.

A few Jewbans dancing on that polished floor

a mirror glancing at them expecting a bigger crowd.

PUBLISHED IN AFTER HAPPY HOUR REVIEW, #18

for Susan Wehle

How you laughed when you found me in the rain

sitting on a chair, heels dug in, leaning, tipping

backwards, unstabling a rafter of wild turkeys

bowing and praying at random as they are wont

to do which, to some, seems like a threat.

I with my guitar, rain clouding my eyes,

ears acutely listening, yet with ease

conducting this strange orchestra

in the middle of a parking lot empty of cars.

Always the rebel, I felt free, and you came looking

for the joy that was harbor, ship, and anchor in you.

As far as time, you were late as usual, but I had nowhere

else to be or go and could think of nothing sweeter

than to wait for you in the rain, which was fortunate

as our timing couldn’t have been more desperate.

We left behind the wild turkeys dancing around

that empty chair: it held a wildly empty ending. text goes here

Even if no one really wants to go there,

we’re all strongly drawn to Eden

but is our map wrong?

Eden cannot be such a peaceful place

all harmonic at a slow and graceful pace.

It must welcome, G-d only knows, how many

strangers every day, refugees, illegal

immigrants, stowaways, lunatics,

poets, dreamers, chimney sweepers,

and at night too, in the dark, such confusion,

thieves, mothers, the lost and the poor

all looking around and at each other.

Truly, paradise must be as busy as any

major train station. What names will we

choose in this noisy synergistic harbor

so different from the Garden we expected?

Here, waiting’s the deal because we

are only what we did or didn’t do

while doing was our option. I think I’ll

sit down on a bench to watch my fellow

travellers and pick up a newspaper, any

language will do because here I can surely

read them all, and since I am already dead,

I will light a fragrant lovely cigarette.

Lame after many days driving. Arizona

not even a word in my vocabulary,

not even a name. Carburetor equally

cryptic, mixing air and fuel. Alternator

at least familiar, a verb for taking turns.

Smell of diesel and vinegar. I didn’t see

you there at a table pasting petals

on a shiny moon. Blindness

has many faces, gaps like sour oranges

molding on the counter. When

the handle to the kitchen broke

in the palm of my hand, I buried it

under your car. Deafness a bird

swooping in after sudden rain. Streets

sweeping light into corners. African

gourd, patient helpful vessel, broken.

Pieces hiding behind the door. My

guitar a stowaway in the trunk.

If I could see myself outside working in the garden I’d move the vase with the yellow tulips,

open the window and shout to myself: Don’t cut the budding branches,

dig by the roots where the bumblebees nest. The tomte and huldra have left long ago.

Your father is brewing his own aquavit, run to find wormwood and bog myrtle.

The owl has already flown. Snake’s gone. Tell the young woman waiting, eyes open, by the wall

to pour crumbs in the palm of her hand and fling them over the gate, to let the dough with honey

and bitter herbs rise under her grandmother’s cloth, to not take our fears and multiply them.

“How did you lose all your verbs? 

I ask him and since he cannot tell me, 

he begins to gesture, points to my kitchen, 

the stove, the old broom, shaking his head.

Ahh! Many verbs you left behind at home;

I try to translate his verbless intent.

Your wife and daughters are sweeping 

leftover verbs into a pile they cannot read, 

hidden behind a door, next to the stove,

where they are protected and preserved?

He points out the window toward the beach 

where waves break, break, break, a restless

gray sentence without end. Ahh! Some verbs

sank on your perilous journey, many more lost

among the murdered and the drowned.

You still hear them scream in clear calls

against the smugglers and the storms.

He lifts my hands to his temples. Ahh! 

Other verbs you lost track of in your memory. 

Life forced you to abandon the joyful verbs, 

the cool, strong, and the needed verbs 

until your tongue became a migrant too.

PUBLISHED IN STONE POETRY QUARTERLY, NOVEMBER 2022

(Also accepted into Aloha Magazine and Yellow Arrow Journal)

White days, she says, an Arab woman

spelling my future in dark coffee

spilled over a small saucer.

Many white days. Not a word of English.

The owner translates. A hundred dollars,

He laughs, to know more. I shake my head.

Here, a holy place, sacred, you must go

find it, big reward. White days good. Sorrow

too I see here. Scared to know if old or new:

love is not love when it doesn’t tell us

what we were and whom to become.

A bird’s on its way. Welcome it, listen!

My friend across the table, what’s his path?

Your friend has a big, sorry heart.

He’s going away. He must leave soon.

“Il ny’a rien de hors-langue” JD

come from a wide square full of bodies

moving like dark sails in the harbor, sweet

figs, staying still impossible—quick eyes

hips, misty glasses of mint tea, salt dust

of Khamsin and Salano. Warning. If you fail

who you are, beware of straying camels

looking for water, halophytes, thyme and acheb.

Clapping, counting, speaking hands know

why your dress is longer behind your heels,

erasing footprints in the sand. Nobody traces

your blackened eyelids. Use the smooth

soot from yesterday’s fire. Look at the heat,

red clay on ears and lips, ancient lake lifting

a duende, older than any word, the hunger beat.

PUBLISHED IN CIDER PRESS REVIEW