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“You see,” Sister Elba said, smiling, “you should never doubt him.”

Her songs, her records—I entered them. I jumped in and out of myself.

The rich man adorns himself and the elegant man gets dressed.

She came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich.

All this while, I am eating the apple in this careless moment of life.

To be married is to learn to love, captive in your own new country.

There is the ghost of a child in me. It longs to die, so afraid of living.

The leaves repeat my fall in choruses more ancient than my own.

An ironic story about skepticism and education, in just six words.

Buckled by time and tides, the pier fails halfway to the deeps.

She leaned back to accommodate the sweet delirium of his hands.

you crawl into a hole & pull the hole in after you on judgment day even our mothers will flee from us.

By the kitchen sink, my aunt held a fish as if holding the Holy Body.

Fishing with Dad guaranteed two days of just us and made me special.

It is here I learn the speech of men. The speechless guilt of every swig.

Even as a child, I was skeptical—testing God when He wasn’t looking.

our minds are not the same if they were the same you would be here

Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.

he has come to write like nervous wasps in my mind like a grocery list.

the bible doesn’t tell us how they stormed up to his ark beat their fists

Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

We had run out of every necessity. You name it, we didn’t have it.

Lunatics call it annihilation . . . Think of it as not doing a thing

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

Years ago I wanted parallel lives, to see how it turns out for all of me.

A child no bigger than small change calls from her window j’ai faim.

Tell her I put poison in the pot and I intend to watch her drink it.

Marianne Boruch

Judith Harris