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How Do You Celebrate Passover at a Time Like This
by Nicole Steinberg

November 26, 2020 Contributed By: Nicole Steinberg

 

Passover Lamb Sculpture
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

 

years of immersion have taught me: there is nothing more 

jewish than to commemorate great suffering in a new era 

 

of great suffering / eating globs of horseradish as ritual 

so there’s a new and exciting reason / to break down in tears

 

why is this night different from all other nights? outside is

a place I haven’t gone in three days / a child keeps calling

 

happy birthday! happy birthday! and for a moment I can believe 

I’m not worried sick about waking life / my uncle and dad

 

my partner and friends / our big plans / everything sucks

if I couldn’t have a woman president I would have enjoyed 

 

a jewish one / a lifelong scholar of suffering just like the rest of us

well-versed in tradition / annual turned perennial / the sturdy table 

 

where we gather to trot out the dead / tell their story and pray 

next year we’ll be in jerusalem and/or together again


NICOLE STEINBERG is the author of Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017), Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), and several chapbooks, including Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018). Her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, and Hyperallergic, and her poetry was selected by Penn State’s Pennsylvania Center for the Book for the 2016 Public Poetry Project poster series. She’s the founder of New York’s EARSHOT reading series and she lives in Philadelphia. She can be found at nicolesteinberg.net.

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: November 26, 2020

Further Reading

Butterfly Balloon by Alyse Bensel

Opaline or starburst or emerald green— descriptors for barbus or brochis or gynmocorymbus. The bubble pump flares sidefins and whiskers. Aquarium fish appear as mechanical wind-up toys. They troll the bottom of pop-rock gravel. A floundering Butterfly Balloon Molly performs a sideshow for the children who muddy the clarity with their fingers or cause underwater earthquakes with a tap […]

The Body by Ellen Elder

At 42 I woke with one breast in a single        suitcase in the cemetery of bell towers We were lucky in a ghost fog I miss you since I’ve lived bone    atoll     lonely I told Ellen it will kill me this time I said, Take the cats,    too I’m worried. You’re a […]

The Poem Under Gag by Abdellatif Laâbi
translated from the French by Allan and Guillemette Johnston

Hello sunshine of my country
how good it is to be alive today
so much light
so much light around me

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