When asked “Where does the Holy One dwell?” the Kotzker Rebbe famously answered, “Wherever you let Him in.”
Hebrew Numerology
desertification
…the desert cropping up in your field
of vision.
I eye its well
by hand…
I feel incredibly fortunate to share this poetry, as it came to be through my experimenting with Hebrew. And to have found it a home in Ilanot Review’s “Translation and Transition” issue inspires joy and awe.
desertification
Closed Circuit
These days the topography of life varies, oftentimes violently. I’m incredibly grateful for the stabilizing forces in my life: among them, poetry.
on our last day in new york
“I color our walls the white of my tooth, so as to signify my surrender to tears our tongues wept.”
Overjoyed to share “on our last day in new york” with The Penn Review in their Spring Issue 73. – CBA
aliyah (a primer)
Deeply honored to have aliyah (a primer) appear in Issue 56.1 of Denver Quarterly. Thank you, Lucien and fellow editors! To see these verses in print inspires awe and gratitude, as they are the first to appear in my novel… which I just finished… and which is slated for defense come early May. Halevai, CBA
2 x Foothill Poetry Journal
Happy to have found an anti-creation myth and passenger manifest a home in the latest issue of Foothill Poetry Journal (https://arts.cgu.edu/foothill-journal/). And deeply honored to have had the former nominated by their marvelous staff for a Pushcart Prize!
their eyes / weary with world…
the latest (in print) ((by way of easterly tradewinds))
catch light
Mallory tells me last night that on Shabbos I mentioned I ought to email you–“in passing” was the phrase she used. An odd choice of words, it suddenly seems. Oddly intuitive. We exchanged words merely three weeks ago. I had just finished Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream. Thanks for that (both sarcastic and sincere). You said it’d be at least another month before we could tell how the treatments were going. I sent you poems in place of the prayers we inherited. The last one about cicadas: “[they] follow everywhere I could never grasp / at dawn they remind me / catch light / catch light / shed.”
Thank you, Paul Lyons, for your wisdom and generosity. Thank you endlessly.
Chaim ben Avram 