Alicia Jo Rabins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

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Sunday School

 

Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,

which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.

Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know

whether it is living or being lived

It happened again on the way here:

a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.

This is a different way of being a woman,

which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now

something must cry look at me, look at me!

And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.

Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.

I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,

it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;

and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because

although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,

crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching

to be popped in the mouth and tasted

(and they offer it as such)

soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.

All the fucking in the world never erases desire,

and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.

So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.

And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,

just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,

offering ourselves up for this one day:

offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday

like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read

and left behind on the cafe table,

leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.” 

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                              Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.

Comments

[Indran Amirthanayagam]

A beautiful poem and strangely out of time, hence timeless. Oh I long for those long gone days when I could take my New York Times to the cafe and gaze at other diners in between page one and two.

Thank you.

Indran

Indran Amirthanaygam, poet, publisher, Beltway Editions.

[Grace Cavalieri]

This speaks to all of us. Thank you. The perishability that poetry makes permanent.

[Jack Skelley]

Moving and immediate. Thanks, Alicia Jo and Terence!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, Jack.

[Barbara Hennin]

I too was thinking how wonderful to turn the pages instead of scrolling through the Times. I think this is a beautiful poem. I can relate to the poem, the subway experience, the desire that stays with us through out even as the body ages. I like the honesty of this poem, the fluid thinking/imagining language. Thanks Alicia Jo Rabins

[David Lehman]

An outstanding poem by a very gifted poet, who manages here to move from the personal and local to the universal, reaching the plateau of human desire without losing contact with the coffee, the croissant, the newspaper. Wonderful art, too: subway riders were always subweaya readers when I took the subway to school or to work.

[lally]

to all of the above comments, i say: ditto

[Peter Kearney]

This Sunday morning's liturgy featured the words: "Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity." Later in the day, I read a contemporary English version of this entire book, which stated instead:"Nothing makes sense. Everything is nonsense." Later still this same Sunday, I came upon this piercingly beautiful poem, which could almost be a personal take on the biblical book, echoing its sentiments with: "what is it for anyway...soon it will be over." These repetitions through the day have the Sunday School lesson for me that perhaps things are as they should be. The words of futility awaken what is at least for today a feeling of peace.

[Geoffrey Himes]

She gets it right: Sunday mornings cry out for ritual: Catholic church or urban cafe, scripture or newspaper, satin vestments or strappy heels, communion host or ripe boysenberry--ripe for only a day, only an hour.

[Clarinda]

The ambience and poignance ring very true. The send me back to the days many decades ago when I used to slide into a cafe on a Sunday to read the Times people left behind. Omg I think a metaphor lurks there….

[Nita Korn]

Your words are a relatable incite into a moment moment in time many of us have experienced but never talked about.

[Pat Clancy]

T -

It's now Friday. I have lost count of the the number of times I have returned to this poem.

This poem, and the Mora, and the Vettriano. WOW.

Thanks for this (these).

[Terence Winch]

PJC: Thanks for the comment.

[Greg Masters]

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