I get a look at my date’s phone screen
where, in place of my name, he has saved my contact as
Jew 1.
Should I be grateful for the 1? Who is Jew 2?
There is a poem, theoretically, where I release this pressure
such that the wound soaks
through my clothes, over my hands and the responsibly-sourced paper
of the book it’s in, which sells a little better than my first book
because, wound.
But this is not that poem.
This is the one where I play for time.
This is the one where I joke about the way
people still think it’s a compliment to say, You don’t look Jewish,
or, I didn’t think you were Jewish.
They’re saying,
I can’t comprehend what you are,
but that thing, whatever you are, is so not normal that I must admit
you don’t seem like you could be part of it
because you’re nice,
and if you hadn’t told me just now I wouldn’t have known
how suspicious to be
of your foreignness.
This is the poem where I’m wry, and barely trace the contours of the wound.
The places I’ve started healing
have to be exposed
to the air from time to time.
A little trickle always comes from the middle
no matter how old I grow, or how understanding my friends.
The wide-open parts
get bound and ignored.
But I feel that red poem possibly existing,
so ask my mentors how they know.
How do you gauge how much to let go
and when to clamp down again
to let out enough blood to say what you must,
so readers understand, which they will, because, blood?
But not so much that the dressing gets lost.
Maybe even the mentors don’t know.
Their partners are adept with gauze.
If there is a poem where I find my mode,
where the guts get shown and sewn back in,
maybe this is that poem.
Is this the one
where I finally admit, as much as I like traveling, it feels like
ninety percent stepping on graves? And that back home,
what I have in common
with the Black colleague next to me, more than our job, is
if our grandmothers hadn’t been able to pass,
we wouldn’t exist.
Because.
And when I cut a date short, not having fun, and the guy says,
That was a miserly amount of time,
I don’t know if he’s just being a dick, or.
I must explain to the Muslim ex-boyfriend that I do not automatically
side with the Israeli army. But sometimes
I choose to side with the Israeli army.
The older ladies who’ve lived whole lives
in a Catholic mindset ask me yet again what my family does
for Christmas
and don’t comprehend the word nothing,
then ask what we do for Christmas eve, as if the misunderstanding
were about the time of day.
And the Hindu man born in Maharashtra
asks what I call one of my churches
and I swallow my first three responses. And my colleague from Taiwan asks
if I have heard of Chanukah. She says it’s like Christmas, with hash browns.
And the waiter in Salzburg, Austria,
where my grandparents fell in love,
stares at me like I’m a thing
sullying his table and his whole country.
I drink my tea and leave a memorable tip.
And the synagogue in Spokane gets swastikaed
along with the Shoah memorial, because they have to vandalize
the record of their own murder spree.
The kid in front of me at the bus stop says to his friend, He tried to Jew me,
and the friend shrugs.
The choir director tells his tenors
that kyrie is Latin. From behind the piano, I say
pardon, it’s Greek. He tells the basses that amen is definitely Latin
and I say, actually, Hebrew. They know how I know.
The guy with the comb-over says
he’s a goy but he likes a sheyna meidl.
And the cute white girl at the party
says,
You don’t look Jewish.
But whether she agrees or not, I do.
Every Jew looks like a Jew.
I’ve got these peers out in the world who aren’t on social media. Some of them read
as much as I do, others stick to podcasts or just listen to their own voice.
I don’t know any of their names. I don’t know which ones got frum in middle age, or if
the disaffected let themselves be secular gradually or all at once. They’re not alive.
The reasons I’m alive aren’t reasons. They’re statements about the arbitrary world: Poles
sometimes stood up. Code-switching works with a straight face. An eighteen-year-old girl
with my last name came to America by herself on a ship full of itch and stink and full of men.
The past is this burning bush, the voice coming out of it unbelievable in both meanings.
I’ve got a friend who is alive and tangible, you can tell by her red hair and the challenge
in her cross-bitten grin. She likes the DNA tests despite being from Ukraine.
She says, wouldn’t you want to know? I say, I know enough, more than I want to.
Because if there’s a part of me that’s not what I am, there’s only one way it got there.
The reasons my missing peers aren’t around include wars but also low birth weight,
too many births, ascetic husbands, lack of dietary fat, lack of genetic diversity, drowning,
gangs between the wars. The reasons I’m alive include antibiotics, attention, breastfeeding,
antidepressants, missing that car by a hair, missing that diving board to the head
missing that Nazi by a minute, missing that Cossack by a bribe, potatoes, neighbors
who took an interest, and, if you believe in letters, then letters on a scroll inside the wood
of the amulets we put everywhere we live. That wasn’t being coy. If you’re reading this
you know I believe in letters. I can still pull an Amidah from my pocket, prefer standing,
get a little antsy sitting in silent prayer. I listen for the muttering, meandering voice
a row away, wait for the cantor to call again. We’re supposed to be praising and asking,
questions are always encouraged. I want to know mine are the right kind, but a sardonic
eyebrow is the main reply. Praise is too easy. By definition, the speaker has survived.
Feels tenuous to say I’m a survivor when I haven't done much of the surviving myself.
Strange to realize, an older relative can also do that for you. At first I typed “strangle.”
My fingers usually know where they are on the keys, but every now and then.
This enharmonic you can call bright loneliness or desolated happy, it’s written this way.
There’s guilt around not wanting children. There would be greater guilt if I pushed
myself to have children I didn’t want. But I have come up with their names.
My body’s undesire for children cannot be used as a retort to the survivor who longs
to see her descendants continue l’dor v’dor, assured like a nervous monarch.
My contented solitude doesn’t keep me from recognizing the Jewish sister
walking into that remote gas station with joy. I love and get mad at mishpocha
writ large. We’ll always be pointing out Jewish artists and politicians and, quietly,
criminals whom we judge more harshly. The tacit fact that they’re survivors too.
There’s guilt around the writing of family-ancestry poems, as if complaining of hurts
that are echoes of hurts; there would be guilt also if I did not write them.
In a pocket of my mind I wonder about the peers not around me because their great-grands
didn’t survive. Crazily I want to know their names, and which ones had dark blue eyes.
In a pocket inside the pocket, so small it doesn’t even have a clasp sewn in, I wonder if
one of the descendants who didn’t live, or wasn’t born, is me. I try not to wonder how I died.
Rebecca G. Biber is a collaborative pianist and music teacher living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in Cutthroat, Delmar, Lilith, The Passionfruit Review, The Petigru Review, RE:AL, and the forthcoming Bop, Strut, and Dance Anthology. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Building Bridges Poetry Prize and the Northwind Writing Award. Her first book of poems, Technical Solace, was published in 2017 by Fifth Avenue Press. She holds BM and MM degrees from the University of Michigan School of Music and an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte.
