Ode to Diaspora with empty hands
Shelby Handler
Audio: Shelby Handler reads.
I lost my keys on the first day
without long johns since September.
Who do I thank for this body
generous enough to suffer a season
sheathed in denim, wool and down,
only to be forced to molt into April
flushed, tingling and stranded?
My body is braver than me. I can barely stand
beauty when I’m anxious: cherry blossoms
plastered to windshields after wind.
A few pale blooms blew
upon my head too. I’m from here now,
I said aloud. Last winter, I cut back
all the blackberries at the old house
where the landlord’s daughters live now.
They’ve taken out the entire bramble,
put bars over the windows and doors,
though no one ever broke in before.
I dropped by to pick up mail and found
they installed a doorbell with a tiny camera
that rings to someone’s phone. A stranger picked up,
said suspiciously through the speaker,
It’s not a good time. The voice was watching me
from far away, pretending to be at home
in what used to be my room.
Surely we both knew something
of that place, but would never
share it. I never went back there, but not
on purpose. There is no knowing if
everything I’ve lost
made me light enough
to make it here.
Ode to Diaspora with a fistful of thread
SHELBY HANDLER
Here is where a cedar skitters your elbows. The witch-teacher says,
Look at the ancestors, pointing to the frond’s spine-line,
where the new growths glow green on the tip, entwined
with every previous season. In your fist, there is a gold thread.
You drag it everywhere: tugging along grandmothers that fled
villages before their burnings. You must pull them out from pine
forests and steerage bunks, but they are still too far behind
to touch. The string cannot be shortened, cannot be shed.
Here is where the wild rose grows. Each bud you harvest
is drowned in honey, jarred, left in warm dark to steep.
We have no sweetness in our cups, the grandmothers weep.
You cannot give them anything. You cannot illume their starless
routes, cannot suckle snowmelt into their many mouths, cannot
do anything. Except go on living, to keep the gold thread taut.
Ode to Diaspora with numb fingers
Shelby Handler
I put maple syrup in my first cup of tea of course I refilled it while there was a murky bit left at the bottom
I’d imagine there’s sweetness remaining in the clay mug Impossible to measure how much though how many
mapled molecules endure and if I g-d willing have enough water in the shining belly of the teapot for a third cup
I’ll probably top it off before I finish the second There will be no knowing how much of the initial syrup still swirls
What if for some reason I kept going for days months years feeding the ceramic vessel
like a sourdough starter Passing the receptacle onto my descendants demanding they fill it tend it
sterilize it weekly while temporarily storing the liquid in a clean modern jar But always returning it to its earthen chalice
Will tea last that long? I’ve heard of honey dug up from tombs of prayers passed thinning and nectarous
evaporated down to essence It may even go saccharine if we ever dared to sip it But who could say
where the syrup ends and the ancestral backwash begins Once I planted garlic cloves
just before winter with a flock of other Jews We stuck them in the dirt with our numb fingers The last thing
to go in the ground because it can survive the frost and like I said it just goes in whole Cloning
we called it We looked down at our stiff hands Someone gave us tea to savor at sunset
A garlic can grow another garlic on and on and on So far from their seeds
The garlic pays no mind Goes sweet and bright in the frozen earth A light bulb in the pitch dark
Shelby Handler is a writer, organizer, and educator living in Seattle on Duwamish land. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, PANK Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Sugar House Review, among others. Currently, they are an MFA candidate and Robinovitch Fellow at the University of Washington.
Originally published May 2022 in poiesis 3.1 by w the trees.