In the middle of this, I also left behind / my mother, forty-six years old, / still menstruating, still falling in love, / her long hair gathered in a sloppy hair pin, / making family dinners

“Once earthenware utensils have become defiled, they remain impure and must be broken.”

“Ars Poetica was for the release of Mizrahi anger, on the cutting edge, about speaking back. Poetry wasn’t ten people in a library anymore. Ars Poetica was built on Facebook, it was like a stadium.”

“Oh yes, please save yourself for poetry,” / said a Libyan friend to my “I dont’want to be political— / I’m just alive” fb note.

[Jerusalem is] the only place I’ve lived where my contact with other writers, artists, and journalists naturally crosses back and forth from professional to mundane matters.

“The little-boy body wrapped in shrouds / is now / the single certainty.”

All in all I’m a worn-out dog living between volcanic mountains / that God created for her, circling in silence / after nothing but to talk to talk to talk to talk …

“She stood there, where he had seen her decades before, where perhaps she had been stationed at the dawn of time.”

“The mole rat is a reclusive creature that disapproves of all other beings and particularly abhors its own kind.”

“stop talking about words / talk with words / contentedly / sufficiently / fully”

“These circumstances led to all kinds of horror stories – one of which I’ll share today.”

“Also my mother and also me / it turns out / were pregnant // and we miscarried on the same day”