My mother and her mother wore the same gold

I call it zahav

When words pressed like pearls on my becoming

Of hunger

Of love of kin

Of a legacy I speak

While my hungry child sits by the doorstep

It is a much softer thing

to be kept sacred by a shell

to enter oblivion

It is only when I draw the characters on my palm and stare

that I become aware of their absurdity

I take the piece of you

which ran its legs under my eyelids

I become your eyes

and find myself in golden

Next to the gates

my whisper drowns

in a collective whisper

Beside the willow tree

in the center of your home

lies its body

You come to my reunification

with my first self

I become one

A dancer and a dove

swing their arms to the beat of darkness.

Peace by the borders?

The Land of Canaan

The Land of Canaan

I am in love with a piece of land

or the feeling it causes me

Where soil aches to birth gold

I put my prayers in its walls

I

I watched my mother slowly lose her feet and legs. I watched her burn half her body, give her lover the ashes. And everyday, I write myself love letters in order to forget.

II

The ash is sometimes on the table where we eat

I press it into the face behind my face

and become her temporary shadow.

When I am only seen by my primal face

the shadows of my folded self

paint patterns on the wall

The space between what occurred and what almost occurred is somebody’s truth.

What is that breath of yours

in the shadow of mine?

Mine in yours

It is one eye and two eyes

placed in the beholders

For these graceless nights

when I become the pedestal

Hands to the sky

To steal pieces of stars

and give half of them to you

You run and run

with your hands on my eyes


So I run

with my eyes on your hands

I look myself in the eye when I sleep

I become the shadows when I sleep

I seek lucidity when I sleep