These three poems by Pinny Bulman wrestle with the mutability of memory while searching for meaning in the wake of tragedy and loss…
by: Pinny Bulman
starlings
barren city winter branches suddenly
covered with black foliage, hundreds
of starlings blanketing
the shivering trees, and i
motion my son to join me at the window
as my phone announces the number
of people found frozen
to death in Buffalo
a survivor describing the blocks of ice
found in a victim’s eyelashes,
something so fragile
carrying something so heavy, my son and i
motionless
watching the trees, their feathered rippling
until a car gunning on the highway
startles the birds, now swirling
into the sky as i
feel in my pocket
for the slip of paper he
pulled from his fortune cookie last night,
one joy
will scatter a hundred
sorrows.
with one breath
i remembered your laugh
again today,
the one we recorded
that night i butchered the name
of some children’s show
and you couldn’t stop
but everything has an end,
each act of remembering
holding a kernel of forget
of pretend,
my memories a mask
increasingly transparent,
how can we protect something
constantly changing?
and i pause,
afraid to listen
to how far a distance
i’ve traveled without you
and then press play.
firebox
time broke here
when the neighboring church died,
the bells that punctuated my childhood
rusting to a halt
pausing the bedroom ceiling’s waterstained fall
to splintered apartment floor;
i lived here once,
now even the mice have fled
for places less suffocated
by memory
my dad used to warn us about churches
his cigarette gestures sketching
blood libels and pogroms
a history set aflame
our ashtrays overflowing;
now i reach under the rubble
to pull out a metal firebox
and find my dad’s notebooks inside,
his handwritten poems
survivors
like my remnant of family
that came to this country,
the ones who taught us to say kaddish
for the unfamiliar names that became our own,
who taught that even a broken time
continues moving forward
and memories can fold like origami
creased and fragile
so we helped my mom pack
to move to my sister’s home in detroit
and i took the firebox
while my brother took pictures
of the discolored bathroom floor tiles
so we could continue meditating
on the impossibility of their cracked symmetry
on my way out
mom stopped me at the door
and handed me
a box of matches;
take these, she said
you’re going to need them.
Pinny Bulman is a Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award-winning poet and author of old shul (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023). He has been winner of the Bermuda Triangle Prize, recipient of several ADR Poetry Awards, and a finalist for the Raynes Poetry Prize. His poems have been anthologized, including in Korean translation for Bridging the Waters III (Korean Expatriate Literature & Cross-Cultural Communications, 2020). Additional literary publications include San Pedro River Review, great weather for MEDIA, The London Reader, Artemis, Pøst, Rituals, Muddy River Poetry Review, Red Paint Hill, Jewish Currents, and Poetry Quarterly, among others.
