Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #1
...when I finally slept again, I reentered the house that wasn’t mine, that I nonetheless knew as intimately as if I’d built it myself. At the turn in the hallway leading to the kitchen, I stood suddenly face to face with my mother-in-law, who was holding her phone in front of her, blank screen facing outward like a shield, as she repeated over and over again, softly, under her breath, “Boro, boro kenar!” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to whatever she saw behind her clenched eyelids, but when she pushed me out of the way—somehow she knew where she was going without having to see—she pushed me once more into the waking world, which is why I’m sitting here, jasmine tea steaming at the edge of my desk, staring at the black cat giving futile chase across the cup’s outer curve to the mouse mocking her from the opposite inner curve. The house, of course, was me; my mother-in-law, a part of me my dreaming self chose to conjure as her. Even in the dream, I didn’t know what I was looking for or why it would have been in the kitchen, only that what I sensed hovering in the emptiness beyond the line I used my mother-in-law’s push to keep myself from crossing had been waiting there for a longer time than I wanted to admit, ready and eager to pounce.
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I'm a poet and essayist. I write about poetry, writing, and translation; gender and sexuality; Jewish identity and culture; and the politics of higher education.
