good grief

When he puts his small hand on my rounded belly
I wonder if he can feel my heart pounding
along with the baby’s kicks
feel the grief as wide as my outstretched arms

feel the ache as they expand, day by day,
like my hips
like the soles of my feet
to the day when they will have stretched wide
enough to encircle two babies.

Bones groan against gravity
tendons close to snapping
in their march toward elasticity
toward more giving, more love,
at what expense, my grief nudges in,
who will pay this bill?

I throw my foot in the door,
fling my body in front of my firstborn’s.
Spare him this pain, this crushing weight,
give it to me.

I have danced in grief before
I have the map
I can find my way through
I know how to live life alongside it

how to surrender and trust
how to taste the sweetness
n my swirled cone
chocolate and vanilla
one perfect lick
at their confluence

drips running down my fingers
sticky
present
melted down into something new

The Source

Most days around five
you will find me in my kitchen
making my favorite kind of prayer.
All higher beings crowd around
my stovetop for a lick. 
Silvery spooned reflections glimpse a flick
of angel wings - Just stopping by!
What is that heavenly smell, they coo.

Freed from the grind of restaurant kitchens
I take my time and work slowly,
at a pace I would have fired someone for.
Though I still keep my knives sharp and clean,
the minimum of respect my collaborators deserve,
bored as they must be by the one onion, two carrots, three garlic cloves
they get to play with these days.

Freedom and time to feed my family
is the source of my sustenance.
I need no thanks, no praise,
instead I bow to the flaming skillet,
offer rose petals to the charring cauliflower,
sprinkle holy water over lemon zest,
sing hymns to sweet potatoes
and cry over the onions.

The days when I cook in clay dug from the earth
and serve with a large wooden spoon
I step ever closer to you,
Holy Source
to that point where we merge into one
and I serve my big, love filled heart
alongside bread
and water.

into the great mystery

This morning
ten minutes
before the roosters begin
and an hour
before my alarm clock,
my son woke up hollering - 
But, I’m still hungry!
As if sleep had cleared the plate
out from under him
and lay it clattering in the sink.
I waited,
went pee,
debated.
Finally I gave up,
brought his little body
in striped skeleton
pajamas into bed with me.
It’s still dark, I told him.
He quietly tucked
his shape into mine,
knees folded to stomach,
blonde head against chest,
the breasts that used to feed him
all warm and comfort and home.
My eyes closed to the embrace.
The curve of his body
through time
A  newborn
An embryo
An idea
An egg
A cell from my grandmother,
the one that formed my mother,
the one that placed
the eggs inside of that uterus,
the one that became me and my eggs
and all of the women
lined up behind us
and the wriggling amoeba
in the sticky mud, the one
who crawled out from the 
water, to be born.

some things I used to know

I used to know my womb
as a desert.
Her darkness
tormented by relentless, thirsty winds,
a thirst so profound
the cells and membranes could offer up
only dust.

I used to know my body
as a rebel.
She sneared defiance at my directions:
Shrink yourself
Be athletic
Lose some weight
but also:
Nurture life
Get pregnant
Become a mother
She railed against my will like it was her job
to defy me.

Knuckles bare, teeth sharpened,
I injected her with hormones,
put her under the knife
and extracted the eggs until I was
drunk on the treasures, those few
precious pearls.

I used to know my baby
as a number.
Embryo #9, AA rated.
Over the long months inside my darkness
he began to tend a small fire,
the one I had buried
beneath sagebrush and sand.
His barely formed soul
and a whisper of breath
fanned the spark,
while I fed it lasagna and sourdough bread
and all of the other things that fires like.

And just past midnight
when he was finally borne from my body
in such a rush of blood and fluids that
no dust could survive it,
I held my perfect body
and told her
I love you.
I love you.

cook for a living

Violet light peeked through the darkness. The birds were already awake but the streets were quiet. Some of us took the bus, which always arrived too late or too early, and some of us drove, eyes searching blurrily through frosted windshields. Our backs creaked and our feet were sore from standing for a living. It didn’t matter what we did last night or how our morning had been. It mattered that we set up our stations before 7:30am so that people could eat eggs with their coffee and avocado toast with their tea.

The restaurant smell hung on our clothes and followed us around, no matter how hard we scrubbed them. At least this place didn’t have a fryer, the old oil smell is impossible to get away from. We told ourselves we were a family, or our chef told us that and it sounded nice. Comforting. We had cousins here, maybe a brother or two, but no wives, no children. We were family, just as messy as the ones we had left behind.

The day had been a good one so far, our movements were synchronized, no one bumping into each other or toes being stepped on. We kept up with the orders and received no complaints. We didn’t even notice when the officers walked through the door. That door was always opening and closing, the beginning of the lunch rush was on and we knew it was better to keep our heads down and focus on our work. Anyway lots of policemen came in here for their sandwich and coffee. We were used to the feeling of being watched, or ignored depending on the situation. But these men weren’t standing in line, they were asking for the manager, for the owner, for the chef, for someone in charge and saying one of our names over and over again. Pedro, Pedro, where is Pedro?

We couldn’t be his family now, we had to step back, had to make ourselves small, had to look away when they handcuffed him. He was still wearing his apron. We closed our ears when he called out for us. We forgot he was our brother, our cousin. We were relieved when they left, when we couldn’t hear him yelling anymore, when we were sure they weren’t going to take us too. The people in line were hungry. Even though our hands shook we squeezed the lemon on the arugula and poached the eggs and spread the avocado on bread, we made it look beautiful and we sent out the plates to those hungry people.

good not to be chosen

My grandmother never told this story.

By the time I asked about that morning in 1939,
she looked at me,
century old cataract eyes
my face a blurry outline
and whispered, “that was so long ago”.

So I fill in the hours.
Had her father managed coffee
before the early morning raid,
or did he rouse a smile for his daughters
with sleep still on his breath?

Or perhaps he made it to work at the lumberyard,
a day resembling the one before:
sawdust brushed from the ledger
a new joke for his son
something about a paper cut.

Maybe they made it to lunchtime,
stomachs rumbling down the road
father and son jabbing
over who mother would cook for today,
Israel’s favorite stew or fish for father?

Within sight of the house, smells of stew,
and a tank.
I saw a picture once
of Jews from Moldova digging their own graves,
maybe it was him
but I don’t know
the outline of his face.

returning

Two and a half years later, I find myself back at the pen. I never imagined that having a child would remove me so completely from the life I had before, but that he did. Coming up from the depths I am so glad to be here again, thanks to a week long workshop led by the author Janis Cooke Newman at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.

It is so intimate, watching someone rub their two bare feet together. Toe caresses toe in a rhythmic trance, driven by the relentless beat of unheard music. I like glimpsing these hidden moments of self-soothing, a word echoed again and again in all of those hopeless books I read about baby sleep. The pages I devoured at hours of the deep night whose names I never knew, reading light dimmed and barely breathing for fear of WAKING THE BABY. A desperate search for the key to a padlock bolted tight on the “knowing”. I cringe at it now, but it was so real, so immediate, the trolling of a madwoman gripped by bone numbing exhaustion, body still torn apart and bleeding, emotions edging her tongue and wet eyes spilling intermittent tears of joy and sorrow.

Two years and four months later I am transfixed by those feet rubbing together, an adult’s feet, probably with children of their own. I can see it now as the self-soothing that we still allow our animal bodies. Looking around the room, it is everywhere. One person rubs thumb over cuticle, back and forth, back and forth. Another traces finger over ankle bone, around and around, around and around. I didn’t expect that I would need to come to a big wooden yurt perched on the edge of the continent to discover that self-soothing, the way that we touch and move our own bodies, is not just for babies. It sounds like an advertisement from the 1940s – Milk! It’s not just good for babies!

Babies. Have I really let myself feel the physical pain of being separated from mine for a few days? Fragments of his DNA swirl in my blood, rush around the crook of an elbow, pulsate down knobby spine and rest next to the throbbing mass of my heart. Four nights is at the same time the minimum of what I need to crack back into my own body and an eternity apart from riotous blonde curls and blue eyes always searching for mine, looking for the answers - is it good, is it bad, is it safe. He now sleeps easily for 12 hours a night, all manner of trucks and stuffed animals wedged under his body for safe keeping. Sometimes he rolls back and forth and back and forth over his hands, settling, soothing. I can only wonder at what he will allow himself once he is a man with children of his own. I can only hope that he will heed that small animal inside from time to time.

garden poem

The tomato plant
has toppled over in the garden.
Red fruit and green vine stretch out,
the plant
barely hiding it’s delight
in being set free
from the reign of bamboo stakes and twine.
I now have to straddle it
and contort my body in strange ways,
to harvest the flashes of sunshine,
but I don’t mind.
The fertility doctor told me
not to do any “housework”
but I couldn’t resist.
It’s not in the house anyway,
and I wanted to feed my soul
along with yours, little hopeful one,
with a tomato
that I grew
in my own garden.