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March 8, 2021

logan lerman stars as jonah heidelbaum in the hunters, & says the birkat hagomel over his safta’s knife

Adrienne Novy

after Jericho Brown & Noel Quiñones

You went to  a matchmaker to put together a group of Nazi hunters?
That’s about the Jewiest shit I’ve ever heard. & then, so too is remembering.

So too is remembering why we must always remember,
that there is always blood that exists in the inaccuracies of forgetting. 

There is always blood that exists in the inaccuracies of forgiving, 
When history is not portrayed correctly, our bodies sense that something is wrong. 

Our bodies sense that something is hungry & knows where it keeps its teeth.
Is that also where your trauma pulls to, or darts across your breastbone? Sharpens into gold?

What must be sharpened into gold if beared in the name of gratitude? 
If our families fled before the Holocaust, what fear have we inherited?

What fear will we pass down in the congregation of lineage?
What prayers have not yet opened in the hollows of our throats?

In the hollows of our throats, what spaces are prayed to for revenge to fill? 
You went to a matchmaker to put together a group of Nazi hunters? 

    Then what kind of warrior                 is she meant to make of me?

 

Adrienne Novy is a Jewish and disabled artist, Bettering American Poetry and Pushcart Prize nominee, and graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program. She is the author of Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018) and the mini-chapbooks, We Have Each Other’s Flowers (Zines + Things, 2020) and Pull (Ginger Bug Press, 2020). Her most recent work can be found in Vagabond City Lit and You Flower/You Feast: An Anthology of Prose, Poems, & Plays inspired by Harry Styles. She lives in the Upper Midwest and has a cat named Laurie.