filet minion (for sylvia plath)

You do not eat, you do not sleep,

Anymore, yellow creep.

You giant pill, you bloodless daffodil, not another peep.

Armies of android smooth–

I feel your harsh gloat.

Shadow porous as Playdoh

And longer than a U-boat.

With toothless mouths and T-bone tongues,

You infect my body till I become unstrung.

My cells expand, I am jaundiced and weak

I took you in, you ungrateful freak.

O’ Koolaid of Konsumerism,

You are melting to my throat

A slick coating of plastic

With no known antidote.

I know the taste of this toxic sweetness

All this pain and I’ll have to be a Beatnik.

I plumb my gullet with the tips of my nails

But you’ll never leave me till I’ve got bloody trails.

Maybe the answer is to drink more of your syrup

So I dose you and drink you in a medicine cup.

I’m drinking the Koolaid that America made

And it turns in my stomach like a yellow grenade.

on water

Tashlich is the Jewish tradition of throwing bread into water to symbolize casting off one’s sins, Cantor Norman tells us. He hands the class biodegradable packing peanuts for our tashlich and we hike down to the stream. What sins could a third grader be absolved of? As I toss them into the water, I scour my mind for apologies. The peanuts bob away down the stream, catching on rocks and branches. I would continue to feel their weight in my pocket years later.

⬪

My peripheral vision is a warm, dark sea. My eyes focus on the hazy colors above me, which whirl gracefully into cherubs and painted flowers. A soft structure supports me under my legs and head. I am gently rocked, suspended in an amniotic cradle. My consciousness returns to me slowly. Lazily picking up my head, I see my grandmother’s face above me. I have fallen asleep in her arms, a child held lovingly in the JCC pool.

⬪

Although necessary to manage my chronic illness, drinking water has always been difficult for me. This is one of the select things my father and I talk about. Some days, a reproachful text will come, asking about the color of my urine. Today, I think he is trying to empower me:

“you are, barring endurance athletes, one of the people who actually needs to focus on regular daily hydration -- to maintain baseline health and function. set goals, set phone appts etc. see what that does.”

⬪

I lean my head back and wave my arms back and forth across the surface, marveling at the bizarre buoyancy. My sister and I are the only living creatures for 233.6 square miles. Cradled by the world’s strangest body of water, we are water bugs suspended on a pond. We giggle at the sheer possibility that water can behave like this. A drop of salty sea enters the cut on my finger and I yelp in pain, not knowing that the wound would disappear by the time we got out. When we rise from the Dead Sea I still feel held, like when you step off a boat and feel the rocking.

⬪

My best friend and I go swimming in the night. To coax me into the freezing water, she tells me that entering the pool will be my tashlich. I immediately wade into the eerie spring, illuminated from below with yellow-green light. I have more sins to cast off now. The glowing water creeps up my white stomach, turning my toes purple and absolving me. I dunk my head.

ode

when he holds me, i know he's trying to absorb me back into his lungs, where he will make me into smoke to breathe back into my mouth and i will let myself go into the ether his bedroom wall drops like a curtain to reveal people drawing us as luminous figures, my back arched, a bold stripe of charcoal, him bent over me as in prayer. or rather people sculpting us out of steel

melting each other down until we reach a perfect, smooth architecture like massive chrome shapes in a park somewhere. and when he holds me we are labyrinths of tilting levers, adjusting the pressure of our windpipes

to bring ourselves to equilibrium