Kafka’s Sister’s Braid
During the occupation
Ottla divorced
her non-Jewish husband
to save him
and their daughters.
Her black eyes
and black mouth
twisted
into a braid.
The braid
became rope,
held by the children
she rode with
until the last stop
on the train.
Through the flame
all you could see
was a blister,
a shard flickering
like summer lightning.
Girl As Sculpture
Inspired by the sculptures of Eva Hesse
How painful it was to be split. Half rubber and fiberglass, the other half sweetgrass and seed. When I was a girl, time was not, and the red bird did not call my name. At sunset I ventured out from two concrete towers and opened my eyes to a blazing sky. Silver lamp posts exhaled their first yellow sparks as night’s sheets covered a wide expanse of weeds. I never asked who I was, or the willow. I did ask why a girl at school told me to stop making noise when I breathed. I did ask why Ashley R. threatened to beat me up after the safety demonstration on the paved blacktop, where a floppy mannequin was hit by a moving car. I wondered why my life felt like a veil. A shadow of a cloud spread across my thigh and I spotted the clover bristling. Empty rubber swings started swinging, rectangular grass plots easing my mind with the safety of their corners. Sewer grates ran parallel to the curb like ribs. A mouthful of pebbles. I curved and I coiled, waiting for sunlight to shape me into a body I could not leave.
On the borderline
of life and art I remain,
poised to reconcile.
The Word I Wish I Wouldn’t Have Landed on is Shmues
Yiddish for conversation when few people still have the taste
for Germanic consonants, appreciate the way they collide
like raindrops after a storm. A sheyn maydl keeps a cowbell
on the mantle, the one her grandmother used to ring, yoyekh
in the air, bits of cinnamon babka stuck in teeth, pickles and kreplech,
fever dream of humor and wisdom with a dollop of clueless husbands.
Velvet cloths brush, sometimes bruise, cheeks. If only we could
shmues every Sunday, would we talk only about the obvious like der veter
or more feverish words that don’t fade but accent a meadow like summer
lightning? You can shmues on Zoom with a glezl tey, but beser in person
like the harmony of trees breathing, full and endless flowing river.
In an interview, the great Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, when asked
“about the Yiddish language dying, said ‘it’s ok, it’s been dying for 1,000 years
and a brokhe if it can die for 1,000 more.’ He said if he could ask God anything,
he’d say make more translators of Yiddish so we can taste the trouble of winter
and the soft yellow challah without the bothersome Hebrew alphabet,
its gutteral stops and shhhhs like sprigs and sibilant murmurs of running water.
The difference between a virtual conversation and a shmues, ponim-a-ponim,
is daydreams, deep veins with Dutch vowel phonology, intonational patterns
emoting joy, anger, sarcasm, jealousy. If I could ask God for anything,
I’d beg for the aleph-beys in bowls, for letters to magically string together
to form the sounds of sighing and laughing, with Hasidic ornamentation,
adhere to tongues like pinpricks of light dancing to express the inexpressible,
wed words with intricately beaded hiccups. Di libe is zis, nor zi iz gut mit broyt.
The Guardian of the Egg
Inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting “The Giantess” (1947)
is a giantess, ruby fur spray-painted over stomach
like a wet slicker, raindrops splashing ankles with trickles
of urine in middle age, always seconds too late, time
to change slacks. Her face is a full moon in a field,
her gauzy cape the net that traps beige birds that peck
and peck. They converse like yentas, buzzing around halos –
how beautifully they speak, yet how much wiser if they
kept their beaks shut. In tiny hands she protects the lifeline
to the next generation. She’s no Virginia Woolf, would never
leave this world by stuffing pebbles in pockets at high tide,
but more Lady Gaga, articulating reinvention through chutzpah
and wisp-gold locks. How fluidly she skates through dead grass
as if composing a sonnet, slips fourteen swirling patterns
through a spindle – to separate seed from chaff.
___________________
Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, ”In the Needle, A Woman,” was the winner of the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and will be published by Finishing Line Press this summer. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including Redivider, One Art, Anti-Heroin Chic, Minyan, Spillway 29, and Plainsongs.