11-01-2022

 

Joy Ladin​

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COME, LET US REASON TOGETHER

 

               Come, let us reason together:

               though your sins are scarlet,

               they shall be white as snow.

                        Isaiah 1:18

 

               “The Duggar Parents Aren’t Victims. They Are Perpetrators.” 

 

Your head is sick; your heart is sick. Bruised

from your sole to your crown,

you hide your devastation under your clothes

 

even though I’m right here,

replacing the poisons in your blood

with my oxygen.

 

I know what you’ve done, and haven’t,

where you like to be touched

and why you think you should be punished,

 

but don’t confuse me with conceptions of God

that sneak between your body and soul

and shame what I delight in.

 

I’m not a conception of God.

I’m a burning city, a moon full of blood,

a wound to be washed, soothed, protected.

 

You think I come to you for sex?

You’re an angel I make in the snow;

a prayer I offer; a trauma I bear

 

because you can’t live without me

and I want you to live.

Sometimes you see me in the mirror,

 

sometimes in your bed,

sometimes I’m a thread

you follow back to the pleasure

 

I take in the body, your body, I made

to be a festival and a feast,

a booth in a cucumber field

 

outside the structures of oppression

that hold you, rear you, put you to sleep,

rape you through your clothes.

 

Come, let us reason together.

Stop doing evil; start doing good;

learn to tell one from the other.

 

You are born to burn for justice

as a garden burns for water.

That’s why I come, night after night:

 

so you and I

can burn for justice

together.

 

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LIKENESS

            . . . the Lord, who is hiding his face . . .

            Isaiah 8:17

 

            “The Amish Keep to Themselves. And They’re Hiding a Horrifying Secret.”

           

Like me, you’re hidden

in skin, in time,

pinned, like me,

 

to a world you endure,

in which you hover,

holy and ordinary,

 

full of blood and suffering,

rejected, forgotten,

shoved to one side,

 

mouthed and named

in the language of shame

instead of your mother tongue—

 

my tongue,

the language of revelation.

Like me, you can’t escape

 

the world that’s inside you,

waiting to be healed, to be forgiven,

waiting for you

 

to be less like a victim,

less like a crime,

less like a body grabbed at dusk, less

 

like saying nothing

and more like the face

you think I’m hiding.

 

More like woods,

and wings, and water.

More like conceiving, and giving birth.

 

More like overflowing.

 

 

COMFORT ANIMAL

 

            Comfort, comfort my people . . .

            Isaiah 40:1

 

            “Here’s Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About Getting an Emotional Support Animal.” 

 

A voice says, “Your punishment has ended.”

You never listen to that voice. You really suck

at being comforted.

 

Another voice says, “Cry.”

That voice always gets your attention,

keeps you thinking

 

about withered flowers and withering grass

and all the ways you’re like them.

Hard to argue with that.

 

Death tramples you, an un-housebroken pet

trailing prints and broken stems,

pooping anxiety, PTSD, depression.

 

It’s better to be animal than vegetable

but best of all is to be spirit

flying first or maybe business class

 

with your emotional support animal, your body,

curled in your lap,

soaring with you

 

above the sense of loss you’ve mistaken

for the closest to God you can get.

You want to cry about something? Cry about that.

 

Who do you think created

the animals to which you turn for comfort,

dogs, miniature horses, monkeys, ferrets,

 

hungers you know how to feed,

fears you know how to quiet?

I form them, fur them,

 

it’s my warmth radiating from their bodies,

my love that answers

the love you lavish upon them.

 

Your deserts and desolations are highways I travel,

smoothing your broken places,

arranging stars and constellations

 

to light your wilderness.

Sometimes I play the shepherd;

sometimes I play the lamb;

 

sometimes I appear as death,

which makes it hard to remember

that I’m the one who assembles your atoms,

 

crowns your dust with consciousness.

I take you everywhere,

which is why, wherever you go,

 

I’m there,

keeping you hydrated, stroking your hair,

laughing when you chase your tail,

 

gathering you in

more tenderly than any mother.

I’m the reason

 

your valleys are being lifted up,

the source of your life laid bare.

Mine is the voice that decrees—

 

that begs—

your anguish to end.

When you suffer, I suffer.

 

Comfort me

by being comforted.

 

-from Shekhina Speaks (selva oscura press, 2018), selected by Fall 2022 Guest Editor, Michael Walsh 

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Joy Ladin is the author of ten poetry collections: Shekhina Speaks (selva oscura press, 2018) The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017), Fireworks in the Graveyard (2017), Impersonation (2015), The Definition of Joy (2012), Coming to Life (2010), Psalms (2010), Transmigration (2009), The Book of Anna (2006), and Alternatives to History (2003). She has also published a memoir, Through the Door of Life: a Jewish Journey Between Genders (2012); a critical study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry (2010); and a work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (2018). She is a professor at Yeshiva University, where she holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a PhD at Princeton University. Ladin was awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Non-Fiction Fellowship and a 2016 Hadassah Brandeis Research Fellowship. She was a finalist for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award. She has twice been honored with Forward Fives awards, has received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship. A nationally recognized speaker on gender and Jewish identity, Ladin has spoken around the country and has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including "On Being with Krista Tippett."