Tefillah Ne’ilah by Yael Hacohen

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.

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Yael Hacohen is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. She has received research/teaching fellowships from Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University. She has an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was an ‎NYU Veterans Workshop Fellow, International Editor at Washington Square Literary ‎Review, and Editor-in-Chief at Nine Lines Literary Review. Her work has been featured in The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly Magazine, Colorado Review, and many more. ‎Hacohen published her chapbook “Between Sanctity and Sand” with Finishing Line Press in 2021.