doikayt
bella blue
skip rocks,
recognize shooting star
from passenger plane
push ups, all the way
down and up
some things i cannot do
but was it so perverse
to want to name a thing?
to believe in an origin
point?
forever abbreviating
virus nesting sublunary
consequences cause i got sick
real bad as a kid i make it
reactivate and spend months
begging definitions
for an infection
which quested me through
globalization and
improperly stored
pediatric tumors of which
two researchers would
bestow their own names
upon and in the office with
the outdated blood pressure
cuff a kind woman who is
named Dr and also she tells
me, Mom, introduces me to
the scale of forever all in the
city where many years
before my great
grandfather, hyman, came
from the shtetl, siedlicz, to
a small island where
concrete pulled
up from earth, earth became
particulate matter
a cloth pulled apart
a name to better anglicize it
removed the -sky left only
a homograph for coal
all that smoke above
our heads, huh billowed out
from coal powered
plants across the river
they lived in the first
century of world wars
apparition
of shooting stars
fog of steel ontologies
it takes work to be secular
too, dad’s cousin departed
all sodden with chemicals
up in rochester, kodak
moment, huh coming to
america we don’t know
where our dead lay
somewhere in the gap
between blare of where they
drew a line upon water to
mark the world concerned
with dying and the rest
of us whimmed to its
trophic cascade
passing cemetery on the q39 only place for a mile where
the grass smells real
anytime you play the horn
it helps you
knot in my neck
this time the left side
that time a good doctor prescribed me 6 necessary fractions now wanted for punishment by the other
fraction of these states,
which too make death,
by which there is
no synonym
the only way to heaven
is from Gaza
i watched on my screen
the child's eyes widening
her father’s body carried out under cloth as we carry these feeble devices these too
are a kind of portal
as is a door
as is a mangled wire fence
as is an arbitrary line
as is a command
as is the exit to the courthouse
and there are no new words.
bella blue is an antizionist Jewish poet and anti-nuclear organizer based in Ridgewood, Queens, and raised in Oakland, California. She is an incoming Poetry MFA candidate at Brooklyn College, and works at the poetry organization, Brooklyn Poets. Her work appears in the chapbook, “A Poem is a Garden”, Cutthroat Magazine, and elsewhere.