Two poems
Reyzl Grace
Alice
Camus said we spend our whole lives
seeking again the two or three images
in whose presence our hearts first opened.
Imagine being thirty-five, so long
tightly sealed, clutching a bottle
of pills meant to shrink you small enough
to fit through the opening. Blank slate.
You choose the images. Rose garden
in the spring, when the croquet wickets
are first spiked? Pre-Raphaelite princess
in a sugarcube hat
laying hold the banner of a white knight?
A spray of coloured dodos, long thought
extinct, bursting into flight? Or a darkened
wood, where crooks of trees hold smiles
that do not appear until a body fades away
and a new one comes from nothing. Maybe.
Or maybe just a veil of leaves dispelled
beneath a sister’s hand, a cup of tea
not quite grown cold, and the half-eaten moon,
waking the season’s last lily for vespers.
That Cancer You Know Turns Down a Trip to the Seaside
Do you know what happens there? No, not sharks.
Newport, Rhode Island, 1962:
a speech at a yachting club about how human blood
and the ocean share the same salinity,
and man is drawn to the sea as to his own
origin. The speaker was John Kennedy,
shameless womanizer, avid boater--
a kind of crosstraining. So actually, yeah,
maybe sharks.
What Kennedy doesn’t
say is that the ocean and synaptic fluid
are both water. Some facts about water:
- sperm whales have the largest brain of any
animal - every pod of humpbacks
has its own tradition of whalesong - marine biologists are usually men,
and whale names often innuendoes - in natural conditions, seawater carries
whale frequencies thousands of miles - four whales a day are hunted
- there are 240 daily femicides
- you had more synaptic connections as a child
Imagine millions of mapless years
when ocean had no plural, but whales
were more numerous, each discharging
itself in song. Then the ships start,
more every year, like tinnitus
after a bad trip. The range shortens.
Two thousand miles. A thousand. Five hundred . . .
What happens when you can’t hear
yourself think?
Do you grow quiet,
neuron after neuron predeceasing
itself? Or do you grow loud, cast
your voice on subtler media than water,
scream on strange frequencies to any
creature that will listen? Only one
has a similar semantic structure, limited
only by attenuating air. Do you fill
their dreams with echoes, tie their tails,
anoint them in a stream of song that shatters
vessels? You know it’s no coincidence
that modern shipping and witch burnings
begin together.
I got a sticker
from a friend once of a crab smoking
a cigarette. “It’s you!” she said—the snipping
claws, the slipping sideways, the dependence
on a fire that can’t be kindled in the sea.
I’m not crazy, just attuned to the mind
of a whole planet slowly losing
itself as the propellers drone on.
So no, I don’t want to go to the beach.
No daughter is here to crawl back
into her mother’s womb.
Aristotle
believed the fetus took its blood from the mother.
In medieval Wales, some said
that put Mary on the cross. The idea
didn’t transfer to Ireland, where perhaps
a certain abbess was more skeptical
of Greek men’s beliefs about women’s
bodies. The skepticism was justified. And yet
salinity doesn’t lie; I have kept
my savor, and it’s the land that needs the salt.
Reyzl Grace is a poet, essayist, and short story writer whose work reflects her memories of growing up in what was once the Russian Empire, her training in history and the study of religions, and her commitments as a feminist. She is a past Pushcart nominee and finalist for the Jewish Women's Poetry Prize and Best Literary Translations, with bylines in Room, Rust & Moth, The Times of Israel, and elsewhere. By day, she works in a library—by night, as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and Cordella Magazine. Find her at reyzlgrace.com and on Twitter/Bluesky @reyzlgrace.