i said “im not going to marry you”

and you said “oh. do you want to get married?”

and i said “…no”

The Princess                                                         ­     The Shepherd

the daughter of the king,                                           went pacing through the

and the child of nobody                                             fields looking for his sheep

There is
no poetry
in me.
There is only
people and

Sitting
on the
edge of
my window
smoking and

Sometimes I sit, 18 and overheated
in the front room of the men's heritage house, where I
play someone else's guitar and twist my hair in my
palms like
yellow bundles of uncooked pasta I  might

My first winter without you
I spent New Years with my hands in an ancient wall
and the stone set my eyes on fire
each a candle, one burning for shabbat,
one burning for you like a yartzeit that wouldn’t dwindle

How do you explain

to your children that the

horrors of the world are real?

There is a concept in religious circles here

(and other shapes;

rectangles, rhombuses,

An empath and a mirror walk into a bar

and the empath says

I see myself in you.

"listen
beloved i dreamed
i thought you would have deceived
me and became a star in the kingdom
of heaven" - ee cummings

Somewhere between
space
(and)
Gd
there's a star

If someone were

standing on top of a mountain of sand (maybe on a camel, maybe with a cough)

along the Dead Sea at four this morning they might have heard

My friend Shira

whose name means song and legs mean trouble

wrote a lovesong to God,

I remember the day you realized you always write about water

and I always write about fire

I also the remember the week I took too much ibuprofen and

The day all of Israel fell asleep,

bald men in the shuk

lowered their heads onto eggs and squash

Your friend asked me if I knew I was the daughter of a king

(I slipped a flower under your dorm room door)

reaking of alcohol wrapping his tsitzis around his fingers

I wonder sometimes what I

couldnt leave behind

if I tried.

I didn’t blow up on Wednesday
although I heard the sirens outside my locked
window and pawed the dusty floor with my feet. It
was electric, the linoleum, humming from hallways doors clicking closed like the pink gun the cab driver shot out
the window on Purim (he was a cowboy), like

Here is what
I’ve
learned in Israel.
1 Your happiness should come first.
1.5 If you know what will make

Sitting on the bus
my Israeli Paul Revere seminary nightmare steps on
armed in pantyhose, eyes stretched
wide by a thick black headband
Dense Brooklyn accent, perfect Hebrew.

Walking through Venice last night, channels

spilling over in the storm, flooding alleys

we walked on raised platforms, arthritic

the  little boy on the

63 back to givatayim

who stepped on my foot

I thought I saw my sister
outside the window,
carrying Tel Aviv in her mouth.
Making a bracha with her teeth,
grinding poems and hair,