[A strange girl.

She wanted to be a pilgrim

and so ate salt for three days.

Now she knows how to be vast

and compassionate. And yet she too

will be drowned in the sea.]

[At the burning of offerings

inside the room we appease the ghost.

Lift up our arms

and watch the women around us

turn into birds.]

[Who are you to talk of a woman’s breasts]

[I have been left in warm sand.

From plume to basin, molecule to mortar, this flawed forgetting

flows, this cascading remembrance claws, clamors. And maybe

I was built to forget the topography

of your nose so I could remember the next

man’s eyes, coins I collect from corners

and floors to leave in crumbs at the bottom

of my purse. Maybe I was built to forget your tongue

on my thighs, your shower towel, how it soured

my nose,

Ten days before Yom Kippur,

God’s night of forgiveness, it’s tradition

to ask it first of my kin.

My neighbors in the south

thirst on your lips lined with dust.

The homes you left in ‘48, I cemented shut

they stand like brick ghosts of the banished.

Our father wronged us both, Ismael.

But I have wronged you more.

Yael Hacohen is a Ph.D.

like a sugar maple. Break me in,

an oxblood boot; I want it to spurt.

I want tin buckets massy with serum.

I want you to see how, for me,

every raindrop’s a paranoid theorem;

a body bloats in every creek I walk.

There’s a train wreck every time (I think)

a bottle fly dies in Ohio. A fractured

family never formally resets.