The Names of God
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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. |
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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.