Deborah Bacharach

 
Who Will You Be?
 
You think you only get one set of eyes? I sport a dozen faces. My breasts are succulent, manifold. I have told you too much. When the sky turned silver I told you two secrets. At midnight I lay your ear on my chest. At dawn I will tell you more. Every stone dies. Today, I’m an open mussel assailed by saltwater. Tomorrow, I’ll be roots for the billowing dawn.
 
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Standing beside my little free library, Michelangelo
 
is not too pleased I'm giving away the book about him I got for my bat mitzvah. At thirteen I hated gold bracelets, opened my arms to art. What that says about my soul doesn’t interest him. Or so it seems as he shakes his scruffy beard and pouts. I haven’t looked at those black and white photos in years, I don’t say. I know as much as I’m going to know about God reaching out his hand. I don’t say that either, and frankly, I hope it’s not true. I have a lot of rocks to turn over still. At the shore, I’ve found crabs tiny and alive, red squishy sea anemones and in the forests, the smell of forests. You’re gorgeous, I say. 
 
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Every time I read Those Winter Sundays
 
and I have read it a lot, I fall in love with permission to throw up my hands and not know and know I don’t know. At twenty-six, I was supposed to know everything, even how to teach silence, love. My students knew love’s austere and lonely offices, pulled their desks together. Today, I find myself caught on cracked hands. Mine so ridiculously soft. Once, I dug a small hole and put the roots of a carrot in. It died because I did not dig deep enough. I have not dug a grave for a beloved dog or for myself before the Nazis shoot me down. Is it cheating to mention Nazis? I think there are a list of things that are cheating: God, Nazis, maybe even bees and the sun. I think about all these things a lot. Would I have just refused and died? Dug in the sun and died? Run and died? We only get stories from survivors. One wrote a poem the whole camp chanted on the way to the work detail. It was a love poem.
 
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In This Version of the Break-up, We Break-up 
 
You decide now, before the ache like a cracked nose, that you won’t love me. In this version, I don’t bang other men, I mean I do, but you have no say. We’re broken up. We don’t travel through gelato, slow tongue curling bites at the end of the world. When I laugh like a twenty-two, you don’t freeze, a light brown rabbit in the dusk.
 
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This was previously published in The Prose Poem.
 
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Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, Only Poems, and Grist among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honourable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.