Safed

      On a bright Sabbath morning, an old rabbi shuffles through the synagogue holding the hand of his six-year-old grandson, a lively boy whose curls dance above his ears as he walks. The old man points to the wall of the synagogue: “What do you see?”

      “A doorway and two windows,” answers the boy.

     The old man squints, smiles in the radiant eastern light. “My son,” he says softly, and great showers of light fill the room like rivet sparks, “you see a door and windows. But I see only G-d.”

A Poem About. . . Math?

I wrote this poem in Fibonacci sequence. Happy math!

                                                          Fibonacci’s Secret

One

one

two, it

starts small but

grows large, like always. 

Numbers line up like toy soldiers

dancing rows down the page, a scramble of leaf petals

and multiplying rabbits- his complex world simplified to a ratio.  He loves

to wrap his mind around like a skein of yarn, twisting over the digits as if in a restless sleep.  The lucky son of Bonacio,

blessed from birth as the genius of Pisa.  Numbers move, fluid as melting ice in spring.

Raucous crowds pass beneath his bedroom window, but they

don’t hear him whisper:  “Only I

know the formula

for the true

secret

of

life.”

And Here Is A Poem About. . .

                                                White Soup

                The man’s hands strap

                wire, duct tape, SimTex

                around the narrow barrel of his chest.

                Trembling footsteps take him finally through the busy shuk,

                where he detonates.  And then there is nothing but the

                high still screaming

               

                of sirens through the Jerusalem hills. 

                A grim doctor slaps the X-ray of a five-year-old girl

                onto a fluorescent surface.  Blank white as a screen, her organs

                an irreparable red gumbo of blood, nerves, muscle tissue.

                She has an hour, maybe less.  From the next room

                he hears the girl’s soft coughing,

                the pinging spit of black bile into a bowl.

                He slumps against the cinderblock wall and waits,

                unable to remedy the damage

                of hands,

                of man.

               

Greetings, Strangers

My name is Sarah and like many of my generation, I feel more comfortable sharing my thoughts and feelings online than I do with actual living people. This is probably because many of these thoughts and feelings don't fit into the usual spectrum of conversation. At 25, I've lived in four different countries and had a lifetime of experiences- student in Ireland, medic in Israel- and much of what I've done and seen doesn't match up with watercooler conversation. "So, this one time, I got drunk in a bog. . ." "Have you ever had an M-16 jam up on you?" And then there's the random. I'm really good at random thoughts. Like, what if the sushi restaurant down the street made a Potomac River roll? With bits of dead cat and crack pipe?

In most sane people, imagination quiets down around age ten. Mine never did. Welcome to my world.