4 poems
Becoming the future
Some days the water cuts itself apart as though it were butter
so pliable and smooth its commitments to change, its lapping
its changeling tides that murmur its names and new names.
Some days the iteration of itself that graceful, that steady and quiet.
Peeling up off itself, wet curvature detaching from wet curvature
becoming something equal parts parts and whole. Some days
the water is all of its cousins —rain drops, mucus, pink sky —
and kisses them and what’s the color of an empathy like that. Crest
of transformation, wet billow of now. Becoming the wave
becoming the great motion of every dense breath becoming.
Nothing can be spared by you, nothing you don’t already have in you.
Every angle of your sopping self gathered up, tucked in, and turned
in another great turning, roll, rumble through. Sometimes the water
shreds away from itself, unhitching then hurtling back onto itself, because
all crashing happens into us, all slamming brings us back to ourselves
none of us can survive without getting wet. None of us can survive
without water, becoming water, leaving a piece of ourself.
It is how we come home. Absorption is a way of touching
the world. Becoming the lake, becoming the tide, opening the hands
to the keys sunk at the palms, dissolving the eyes, taking thick breaths.
Traveling the wave to become waterlogged, mutable, known
by forests and rivers and sewage systems in other cities, and streams
and tears and slurries of winter. To journey the wave, to swell and to surge
means the fat hands of children slapping against you, the felt
tongue of the duckling dragging its way through you, the
crimson blanket of sunset drawing across your face
it means you are never separate, never other than world,
never other than every thirst for your voice, every kindred
parched or sated but containing your echo, it means belonging
to all of these drenched relations, and leaping and arcing and
dancing at all hours and stuttering with currents and screaming
with storm, and dipping and swooping and lunging and lapping
and being nothing other than every
possible thing.
fragments of an anthem
in our generation nobody doesn’t talk
about the melting
nobody doesn’t talk about the throbbing
nobody doesn’t throb about the typing
when we are born we know about
the screaming trees. we see their
symphonies flicker the dark eyes
of our mothers, we throb about
the mothers, we type
about the fires
when we are born we know the milk
is sour with curdled water but we
drink it & we are grateful because
we pray. in our generation prayer sounds
like limbs in sand on coastlines rivers
sidewalks gilded pools of puddled rain
prayer sounds like sweat & sex &
sadness, prayer the gratitude the earth gave
back to us in exchange for the death
of our species. sometimes it sounds
like we are yelling but we
in fact are praying
Oh, how we pray
we snap our hips and limp our wrists
and Oh how we long for prostrations
we cook what is dead and we eat it
nobody doesn’t grieve when they dance
no body is not an elegy body
the ankles the floodlights the whimpering
shoulders, the flesh doing its fleshdance
of chance and decay, the fleshgreiving, bloodsongs
Oh, how we want, how we are one another’s blood
& we learn this & it is painful every time
we learn again that we are one another’s
blood but not flesh. in our generation
nobody doesn’t talk about flesh
how it burns how we burn for it
how before us generations burnt villages
continents, burnt aquifers, grave sites
naming the flesh, in the names of the flesh
when we are born we know that someone came
before us, someone cut their teeth before us here
on this roiling century. we are throbbed
by forests, flickered by mothers
we ache & we dance & we try & we pray
in our generation we hold each other
by the hip, we hold each other
by the dusty moonlight
we hold each other
by the chin
father-tumor
and all the while the body lays her
bones along a moonlit track
the stars come out to greet her, whispering their stillness
burn, they tell the body, burn and burn out
time like spindle, mortal
like the opposite of stone
hungry stone inside of him
thicket of knowns and unknowns
my body remembers a heaping of bodies
inherited from his tucked-in places
folds of skin beneath his arms behind his knees
anywhere creased enough can hold the dead
he always told me he was born
because the unsurvivable can be survived
skin of my skin
altar of my salt and my palm-print
a father is like sunlight— always dripping overhead
father, too bright behind the eyes, requires squinting
like a wall, a father, all these father-walls compose a city
city of loss, city of ample populations
a city grows inside a body packed in tight with other bodies
a city is a stacking together of elegies
heaping unspoken kaddishes
requiem library without a decimal system
remember the graveyard across the world with the wall
of ancestor names whose bodies never made it back
voices bounce off the walls in the city
raucous of father, seeping fatherlight
the news of it bouncing before it is spoken
the news is a snarl of unspeakable things
burn, the stars come out to say
burn and burn hard
it is confusing to inherit life from those
who survived and still come to us mortal
Elegy becomes Memory
I thought I was done
writing about the dead
but they surface in me still.
Tonight a memory of him
atop a mountain crowned
in autumn, him extending
his long knobby arm and
at the end of it, a thumb.
His callused, bobbing thumb
balanced at the tip of that
long arm, his eyes glassless,
purposeful, honing on the
thumb. Swinging his arm
from side to side and locking
his retinal optic nerves only
on that thumb, a valley
of browns and velvet reds
sprawling out of focus behind
the anchoring appendage.
His knees bent slightly,
shoulders crisp against the
season’s breath, he almost
could have taken flight off
that bald-faced mountaintop
if not but for the thumb
that held him like a dark
black spool of thread
attached to earth.
I thought I had recorded
every single memory of him
but that’s not the way it works,
our dead coming up for air in us
as if they were the muscled
backs of whales, a memory
cutting upward through the break
in a wave of the waking world,
a long thick drink of oxygen.
On the mountain he was
showing me exercises from
the vision improvement course
he’d been taking, his eyes
bolted onto the farthest bud
of his own distant limb,
the whole world streaming
just beyond his sight in a
slurried fog of movement.
He said he thought his eyes
were getting stronger. And isn’t it
always the dead suggesting to us
the possibility of the impossible,
not what’s beyond our sight but rather
what is there, contained within it.
Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her piece “A poem with two memories of Venezuela” won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, and her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Ninth Letter, and Plenitude Magazine.