Three Poems by Tara Zafft

672

My friend tells me something
happens to the brain, when you
hold a baby in your belly. Forever,
she says. In a text when I tell
her my son is leaving. Going back
home. What is home? And she asks
how I am and I say after a pause
and so many breaths she thinks
we’ve lost the connection, grief.
Like a limb has been cut off. Like
my head is under water. Like I
can’t find those breaths I just
breathed. Like I want to go back
to sleep. Of course, she says. But
I’m a feminist! I scream so loud
on Rothschild that dogwalkers
and bicycle riders glance my
way. But in a country hemorrhaging 
war, a screaming lady is hardly
an oddity. I tell my friend
I thought back in my twenties 
I’d be one of those ladies alone
in her ivory tower with her 
Dostoevsky and port, sipping on 
nihilism and sadness. Content-enough
living the life of the mind. But
that was before the two blue lines
on that pregnancy test bought at our
downstairs pharmacy in Petersburg. 
And the brain forever changed can’t
go back to Dostoevsky. Or port.
Or homemade kombucha or
even walks on Shabazi full in its
bougainvillea bloom. Something
happens when you carry a life in
your womb. Forever, I whisper
back. And a few blocks down, after
I’ve said goodbye to my friend, I
see a woman with 672 written in
blue ballpoint pen on masking tape
on her pale pink shirt. Pushing a
stroller, a boy not yet two sleeps
reclined. His thick black eyelashes
soft. Strong. Know nothing of 
of war. And in the midst of my grief
I think of this boy who will one day
wear green and my son—who now is
leaving this war.

Red Velvet

I wake early in a quiet
Bushwick walkup. Have
espressos, jump on the L
bound for Chelsea Market.
Why—on a perfect May
morning, warm wind on
my face I feel the need
to be under ground in brick,
to walk through Japanese
snacks and CBD-infused
vegan chocolates, and the 
best almond croissants in
New York, says a woman 
in front of me in line at a 
bookstore. Just before
I overhear a grandmother 
and granddaughter behind 
me in line say something in
Hebrew and without a thought
I say, ivrit? Which I think
scares them so I proceed
in English to disclose 
close details about my life
the way one does when
one encounters compatriots
abroad. But—is this abroad?
I think, staring at signs 
advertising new releases.
I tell the grandmother and
granddaughter I moved
to Israel just before the war
and we share a pause that 
needs no words. I don’t 
tell them how much I needed 
to see them this morning, how
I needed this silent smile with
people whose language I am 
still learning whose country 
I am still learning. Who know
what I know—now.
I don’t tell them I wake every 
morning in a panic. Search
for words, scan my brain,
find—none.  That sometimes 
I settle on the least common 
denominator—a slow line 
or dirty dishes, because
maybe if I can wash one dirty
dish I can erase this wordlessness.
This inability to hold—this
moment. And later that
afternoon, sitting with my
daughter in a cafe filled
with flowers, the barista
walks up to me and hands
me a red velvet cookie
sprinkled with rose petals
and I exhale.

Martyr

I don’t know the moment it
started, perhaps it was sitting in
the San Diego sports arena that doubled
as a concert venue and mega church,
where I saw with Grandma, after
she’d found God. After the pot-selling
and nudist colony teepee. Maybe it
was watching from the balcony
as crying ladies pushed their crying
children in wheelchairs to a stage
where women with bright red lipstick
on their cheeks and big sticky hair
and big sticky smiles sang songs 
to too-loud electric guitar music. Maybe 
it was the blue-polyester suit trousered 
preacher with his sweaty white shirted
chest that smelled even from way up
in the balcony. Maybe it was the 
floppy Bible he held as he screamed-spat
threats to someone that I could never
figure out. Maybe it was my former
pot-selling Grandma now mascara-face-
blackened being handed tissues by 
a lady holding a crying baby. Maybe it was
the promise that the devil was coming,
that I had to take up a cross and do something
with it, a cross that was probably filled 
with splinters, like the wood forts cousin Jimmy 
would make me build down by the creek 
where rattlesnakes lived, just down the road 
from Grandma’s teepee. Maybe it was the 
secret punches and secret bruises and secret
tears I learned to hide. I think, staring
across my too hot coffee at a friend
who misunderstands my understanding of
the word, martyr, and glares with a glare
that silences me with a silence as loud
as all the screaming in that sports arena
back in San Diego.

Tara Zafft is a recent winner of the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. She has published in the anthology Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press. Tara received a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK.  In addition, she regularly teach poetry workshops.