Copyright (and other poems)

              “Sitting in the studio when they called to let me know my song had made 
               No. 1 in the USA.” -Max Martin

Everyone wrote “Footsteps,” or so they
Claim, is the thing, except that actually
             I did. 

It came to me one night in a dream,
I mean, in a chatroom in my dream.
 
Crazy, right? Another user had just
DMed me some very unsettling images, 
            and He followed

Up with the poem. I know I won’t get any credit,
This being Scandinavia and all, with its stringent

Regulations about who gets to write 
Pop songs, but still, Lars and Sven

Do owe me a debt of gratitude for the time I gave them
Aubrey Graham’s email, which they claimed 
            “to have lost?” 

They asked me, the only living yid in Stockholm,
Knowing I had the login info to the Database. 

Every time I looked down into the sand, in the 
Weeks after letting the infamous father-son duo 
             into Drake’s inbox like that,

I saw just one set of footsteps, which told me
I was being carried by the Lord, even though
             I was suffering, you know?  

Memorial Sonnet

There was this dog on a train through the Czech Republic,
his head the size of a watermelon. He was loosed, and spit 
flapped from his jowls. In the panic, the man checking tickets   
forgot to ask if I was a Jew. I reached for the dog, all went quiet. 
Citizens of Europe, bear witness, I felt the clamminess of his mouth    
as he bit off half my pointer finger, like we agreed beforehand, 
and leapt through a window, carrying part of me further south.
They got him on the coast, tranquilizers. He slumped into sand,
then they used a machine gun. They returned my finger’s part, 
along with his head in a plastic bag, warned me via chat to forget 
the whole story. There was something to that, for when I started
to write this, I felt the scabbed-over flesh on my finger grow wet
and taut. They burst through, tiny whelps, tongues dripping drool. 
Safe at last, I fell into grass, blood and spit on its tips like jewels.

Author/Illustrator

  • Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and was the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, among other honors. His second novel Before All the World is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2022. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, The Common, Barrelhouse, Paper Brigade, and elsewhere, and he is the recipient of a 2018 National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' Honor and a 2020 MacDowell Fellowship. Moriel lives with his family in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

  • More than 8,400 super high-resolution images from the Apollo missions have been released onto Flickr, a huge upload which allows the general public to see the historic photographs at an unprecedented quality. The images were captured by the astronauts using an array of high-end Hasselblad cameras - a "medium format" camera which used film three to four times as large as a standard 35mm frame, hence the wonderful amount of detail. The upload is the result of a heroic effort by Kipp Teague of the Project Apollo Archive, a site working in tandem with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. From Public Domain Review,/I>