a selection from City of Skypapers

Three Poems by Marcela Sulak

It’s Better to be Smart than Right

To get here today I had to wait at home 

while Dr. Dalia Marx explained her interesting 

theory that Israeli motherhood begins 

with what the father is willing 

to sacrifice, in women’s poetry, because the phone 

was plugged into the wall, recharging 

the battery. To get here today was easy

compared to getting here last week 

when I missed the bus 

by five minutes because 

I couldn’t find the phone 

and waited in the sun 

reading poems about Sukkot, 

forgiveness, and Yom 

Kippur by depressing Israeli holocaust 

survivors or children of holocaust 

survivors or those expelled from Bagdad, 

Aleppo, Cairo or Salonika, and their sons

who fought in serial wars. Today I had 

to face the wrath of my daughter’s prin-

cipal, and the wrath of the disgraced

woman we’d thought to hire for native-

English speakers and who called me a back

-stabbing bitch on facebook 

when we did not hire her, though 

my friend said her daughter liked her, 

she herself might question 

the propriety of 10-year-olds 

writing about Jack-the-Ripper. 

Since it was just before Yom Kippur, 

we wrote a nice note to the principal 

to clarify that we thought well 

of her teaching. Getting here today 

it seems there are more mistakes 

than not-mistakes, though this bus 

has finally arrived, and with brakes 

and wheels working, the card reader 

beeping, and that mechanism 

which distinguishes Jerusalem 

money from that of Tel Aviv, and bus 

money from train, the back door closing 

when it ought, and the driver having 

obviously found his sun glasses, 

an ironed shirt, belt, drivers’ license, 

and managed to shave without cutting 

himself. I wonder how often 

he hears It’s better to be smart 

than right, and if it’s as often 

as I do. I am reading about 

the production of space when 

we get to the place soldiers get 

off. The tall, slender one—

who floated on like a kite 

is still adrift but displaying no 

anger when the driver scolds 

him for failure to show his ID

—is asking directions of civilians. 

The woman beside me is sniffing, 

I think she might be crying. 

Let him go I mutter, in case 

she needs some advice.

Skyping into Gaza

Yesterday I looked out of the balcony into a street in Beit Lahia, Gaza,

and there were white buildings and green, leafy squares, and a noisy

wind that slapped the curtains. I showed Mosab my street, too,

in Tel Aviv. 

Mosab named

his daughter Yafa, for his ancestral city. From his roof he can see

Ashkelon. When I walk from my apartment

twenty minutes to the sea, I see Yaffo’s lighthouse

and towers, its walls that slice the southern coast.

There is an orange tree suspended in air  

somewhere between the walls 

of the old Crusader city.

I haven’t always

lived in Tel Aviv. My daughter is named for 

a woman, not a city. This morning I ran 

along the sea, north, away from Yaffo, 

towards Naharia, then back down. 

I’ve grown 

very strong carrying around what I have lost. I ran 

and ran, until my clothes were wet

with the sea, because I never cry.

How one body

replaces another, how it is never quite what one expects,

this transmigration of bodies, from a city to a baby,

from book to an accordion, footsteps that move us

closer, the ones that move away.

And I want 

to write to Moshe the filmmaker, and ask how much 

light it takes to hold an image in place, 

how many shadows, and fingers.

Mosab 

has never left Gaza since the day he was born. 

Gaza is 141 sq mi. He says he travels through books, 

through words. He sent me some of his words. Indeed, 

they are flight worthy and well crafted in their sentences. 

And it was awkward, at first,

when I stepped into his living 

room, into his library, the one he is amassing anew, the IDF 

having destroyed his previous

one, or maybe it was Hamas. I didn’t ask. 

We sat there together, 

and he answered my questions: 

they cook with gas, but it is expensive; sometimes 

they’ve needed to burn wood. No, there is 

no milk or meat in the house

when the electricity is cut off.

Then he has to go to the shops and buy 

each time they need.

I am sorry, I say, 

for asking about unpleasant 

things. I want to know him as a person. 

But people live in bodies, and bodies live in homes, 

and homes are placed in cities, and cities once 

had walls, now countries do, and bodies

have skin, and words have wings, and names

are everywhere, and when they leave

they leave gaps.

Silence : Siren :: 

November 2012 my daughter grasps the soap,

Castilian peppermint, and starts to yell,

first soft, then growing louder as I grope

for the door handle in the dark.  She tells

me when it’s done (she’s sun, I’m heliotrope)

and the black paint lines from her arms dispelled,

It was a soap siren! And then she laughs.

And I laugh, too. We laugh and laugh and laugh.

We had no siren yesterday, but today

a bus exploded near the hospital.

I’d taken my girl to kindergarten—Wednesday—

as I did every day, on a bicycle. 

“Oh yes, please save yourself for poetry,”

said a Libyan friend to my “I don’t want to be political—

I’m just alive” fb note. So as he asked I’ll note: in Gaza

it’s worse. It’s also worse in Syria.

And as children we were required to eat,

for the starving children of Cambodia,

without complaining, everything on our plate.

Why couldn’t we just send them our lasagna,

we said, surely our eating didn’t alleviate

their hunger.  Two years and a second war,

my child intact, I’ve understood

the point is gratitude and not the food.

Dead baby, dead baby, dead baby, dead

teenager, some blood faked, some photos borrowed

from other wars, numbers inflated

for sure.  And yet, a single photo

of a dead child—after that, what can be said?

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxweapons stored

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxresidential areas

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxphoto opportunities

My daughter asks me if the big bad wolf

is the “bad guy” in this bedtime story. 

At the risk of damaging her cognitive 

development, which needs clear-cut categories,

I tell her it’s his nature to behave

this way; he isn’t bad so much as hungry.

Of course it’s easier if you aren’t the swine

on which the hungry wolf prefers to dine.

 (Man passes me on a bike with a 12-rung ladder, 

a broom, two brushes , two big green plastic pails,

and a cigarette between his lips—metaphor

for something, I say) (Israel’s too technological

ly advanced, says Paul, for such a metaphor,

but I’m not so sure.) We’re on the brink of all-

out war or peace. This silence that’s endured

thirty-six hours has me unnerved.

My daughter and I stop outside Ha-Bima

coming home from school to watch jugglers throw

sticks.  The silence presses, oppresses, I mean;

the missile siren’s late today, and no one knows

what time our daily missile will appear. All this time 

we can’t relax; we’re scanning the public square for holes

to hide in; children play within ninety 

seconds of them. Still we can’t resist pretense of normalcy.