Feature image by John Chamberlain. Dolores James, 1962. Welded and painted steel. 72 1/2 x 101 1/2 x 46 1/4 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2015 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: David Heald © SRGF.

I too drag around tin cans
so you can’t kiss me.
I too have been beat up by cabbies
thrown out of moving cars,
gotten into screaming matches with cancerous secretaries.
I too am covered in war paint
like indelible ink, quick to jump
to bait, to horse, to flower—
don’t look both ways
when entering the river. I too seal off
passages to my heart like a besieged country,
cut losses, cut brothers, don’t look back
when I am lost in the forest. I too fear
invisible drunken singers, I too fear
white horses. I too can’t
forgive can’t stained-glass out of here can’t tell you
words of love when you ask for water.

 

Yosefa Raz
Yosefa Raz’s work has appeared in ​​World Literature Today, Jacket2, ZYZZYVA, Try!, ​Tikkun, and ​​Entropy Magazine. She is the author of the poetry book​​ Home Land: A Novel, the chapbook ​​All these years practicing while momentous changes were happening all around (Gavia Immer, 2015), and co-translator of WWomen's Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant.​