Walnuts

My grandmother seesawed
Her hands and chopped
Two-tiered
Nuts first brains then powder,
For the taste, the crunch
The filling

Pastries hiding low
And under blankets
To rise, billow become flaky
Unsolid air separating layers
Of dough shaped beloved by
My white haired grandmother.

I, like her, crochet
I, like her, bake
I, like her, isolate

For a long time I hated her
Berated her for her slowness
In comprehending
In her gifting me with her daughter
In her lapse of saving
Her drowning eldest
My mother afflicted and cursed
And who never did spare me
From the rod or the evil eye
I was fair game for both
To banter between them
And I suffering in a corner
Finding solace in devil’s cake
And barbie dolls yet to be beheaded

My mother’s altar of preoccupation
The residual of a lifetime of pain
It was hard to trust mercury
But grandma – grand in your alchemy
You knew your dough, your chickens
And the approach to newborns
You had a stoic stance when it came
To my mother
SHREI NISHT CHANI
The echos of Passover
DON'T SCREAM CHANI

And when the decibals of chaos
Lessened the torments of hell
Would move
Inside into my mother's heart
Formulating into resentment
I was my mother’s demon
Her antagonist, her begotten
Her hope shattered
Her remnant from father
Martin’s seed
And we all carried some fallout

But none carried the core
Of the illness
More consciously
And deliberately than I.

Don’t scream Chani.
Don’t worry.
Don’t don’t don’t

Brooklyn annihilated
Pulverized nothing to cling to
Nothing but a bicycle that would
Take a fat pubescent from hell
To open spaces
Scapegoat gets reprieve
Try to find me in the woods
Motherfuckers
Heavy hearted returned
To find the shrill
The drill of love offered
In a pot of oatmeal

And the words of really really
UP
Giggle
And the curses of really really
psychotic
SCREAM
Walking this way
wrong.
Talking that way
wrong!
you never did know
Exactly what you were in for.

Try to make sense
Feral child
Try to make a life,
Star child
Try to make seder
In flash fried moments
Where sister, grandmother
Put the pieces together

That still doesn’t explain
My sheer terror of
Festivals
And synagogues
And families.

Best be left alone.
Best breathe a sigh of relief
Take it, treasure it, it’s not gonna last
In a second the light will be bust open
In a short circuit
Your heart broken
Your nerves singed
Your mind trampled
Your soul infiltrated.

Seize the moment to go
Run for them hills
Seek out a friendly stranger
Adopt a hippie, a stray cat or dog
A clipped winged angel
In the guise of a run away
And then find comfort at the end
Of a joint, in a beer in a pill or in a
Mountain. Whatever it took to get
free.

Grandmother – you rose high
for trying to intervene
And for your kindness throughout.
No one could not bless you.

Chag Sameach Rivka
I’m still waiting for the chariot
Still waiting and praying
To rise a little higher
into the space of joy
and become who it is I am.

Wishing you were here,
Love,
Joy