High Holidays

By DON SHARE

Rabbit fur and hair strewn through the lawns
of the Midwest!
The famous feral parakeets of Chicago
are chattering
With cold. I want to drown myself
out with the roar
Of the greenish river that slices my city
into two.
Nothing pertains, if that’s the right word,
to what I’m hearing:
Little kids singing Benjamin Britten’s
Ceremony of Carols or, if only
In my mind’s ear, what I’m able to recall
of the Kol Nidre:
Rushing over the notes, as if in an unearthly
hurry to get someplace.

 

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow) and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions, a 2012 Guardian Book of the Year.

Click here to purchase Issue 01

High Holidays

Related Posts

Black and white image of a bird with a long neck

Dispatch from Marutha Nilam

SAKTHI ARULANANDHAM
With the swiftness and dexterity / of a hawk that pounces upon a chicken / and takes it by force, / the bird craves / snapping up a vast terrain / with its powerful, sharp beak / and flying away with it. // When that turns out to be impossible, / in the heat of its great big sigh, / all the rivers dry up.

Tripas Book Cover

Excerpt from Tripas

BRANDON SOM
One grandmother with Vicks, one with Tiger Balm, rubbed / fires of camphor & mint, old poultices, / into my chest: their palms kneading & wet with salve, / its menthols, to strip the chaff & rattle in a night wheeze. Can you / hear their lullabies?

Blue cover of There is Still Singing in the Afterlife

Four Poems by JinJin Xu

JINJIN XU
my mother, my father. / Her skinny blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette. In the beginning, / it is already too late, but there is hunger & no time / to waste. All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork / yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.