Art by Jonathan Ehrenberg
New York City
The Receivers
Between the two towns, a snowdrift
like a sea gone astray, and a mountain.
These children on this side the receivers,
living downwind. The other children,
always giving over, having been
born with no trust in attachment,
to wildness. They are packers,
with leather pockets built
into their shoes and clothes. Children
with picks and miniature axes, who lean
against the ice side of the mountain
and sing to those who stay in place.
Art by Jonathan Ehrenberg
The Double
Who was the baby
in the other woman’s body,
the year I was born?
Both of us dangled
like clothes on the line
strung between buildings
in the steel-tinted colors
of 1978.
Sounds could reach us there,
like neighborhood firecrackers
forcing a farther world into us
with our mothers’ backward
falling breath. Nearby,
women came out of the rubble
still pregnant years after
the children were conceived.
I kept you in, the women said,
because you were the pin
holding down the world.
And the kitchen was bright
where my mother bathed me.
Uptown, there was another baby,
mine, by the right of the year,
and concurrent with my grandmother’s death.
Only wanting to be able to walk outside now
in 1978, and face
the emergency of birth.
Erica Ehrenberg’s poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Paris Review Podcast, The Common, BOMB Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series, Poetry Daily, Guernica, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, and a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently teaching courses on the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature and works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.
