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Girls
Besides teaching sixth- and seventh-grade English, I’m also homeroom teacher for the entire seventh grade, which consists of forty-nine girls who are impossible to tell apart as they all appear to be named Lisa and wear identical outfits — white blouses, green skirts, green knee socks.
June 1998Truant
Our high-school principal wagged his finger / over two manila folders / lying on his desk, labeled with our names — / my boyfriend and me, / called to his office for skipping school.
June 2017Parade Day
Today is the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. I am watching it on television in Brooklyn while the Puerto Ricans are parading up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
February 2020
Memorial Day
I was impatient / as you selected / the flowers / one at a time / for the bouquets: / the peonies, pinks, / and coral bells / you had grown.
January 1999The Wrong Imam
If we could have been inside his heart, if we could have been offered transportation from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed: Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God while we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find places for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet.
December 2017
Passover Questions
I feel defined by loss, my shape delineated by the absence of those who used to surround me. The invisible membrane of love that held us together for so many years has become stretched, attenuated by time and space and death. But when I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still feel my son and my mother.
April 2007
The Exegesis Of Eating
And thou shalt treat the food that touches thy lips with reverence, in recognition of the labors and traditions of thine ancestors, and in communion and fellowship with those to whom thou art tied with bonds of blood and love.
June 2002
For A Future You
I drop by on a Saturday. Your mom lets you answer my knock on the apartment door. The cap of your gastrostomy tube is outlined against your unicorn T-shirt.
August 2020
What I Didn’t Do
I never called her back, the woman / with the two babies born just like mine: / girls who couldn’t crawl or talk, / could barely smile, who lay there, / bundled in flowered dresses, staring / at the ceiling.
June 2013
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