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The Names of God

When do you get to think about God
when the child’s nose is dripping
onto your breast and you’ve sunken
into the rhythm of your own voice
humming a song you can’t remember
where you first heard it
at the end of a twelve-hour day of this
rocking back and forth
pinch of sciatic nerve
as the child snorts and rubs his face on your skin
and you both surrender
staring at the twilight sky out the window
the hideous glowing blue promise of dark
when you sink into the physical moment
of holding, rocking, and somehow being rocked
and you try to remember why you started writing
in the first place
when you used to sift through the names of God
trying to find the one that maybe even you
could pronounce
as the child moans
one long syllable — ​
There is no time now
to think about God
and anyway you have accidentally
made a prayer of your two bodies
by the darkening window.
Picture
Orit Raff. Shangri-La #10, 2009-2010. Lambda c-print, 110/150 cm. Courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery, New York and Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Hila Ratzabi was selected by Adrienne Rich as a recipient of a National Writers Union Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbook The Apparatus of Visible Things. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, The Adroit Journal, Linebreak, and others. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the anthologies Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Philadelphia. She is the editor-in-chief of Storyscape.
Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard College. Raff’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, Israel, and the United States. It is part of major collections, such as The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Wellesley Museum, MA; CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder; Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel. The artist is represented by Julie Saul Gallery, New York and Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. For more information, please visit www.oritraff.com.
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