I am writing here, now, reflecting on what was there, then, with the hope of furthering that experiment by recording my experience and sharing it with you.

grief gripping my temple like a loaded gun

“So what if me\you / Are\aren’t wonderful poets / Eventually we’ll all meet / In the same darkness”

“…my apartment is full of tables; I have at my disposal a table in the bedroom, in the living room and on the balcony; the more tables, the more sorcery.”

10 Poems by Elhanan Nir (translated by Ross Weissman & Itamar Landau) Reb Hillel Zeitlin was Revealed to Me When doubts come to a…

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 …