Contrapuntal with death wish
This year
broke my heart
beyond the borders
of language.
I try to tell my therapist
I don’t need convincing to believe
survival is possible. The
many griefs
that I do not know how to hold
are close enough to
coat the skin under my eyes in darkness.
I don’t want to kill myself, I just want
my name
to take flight and scatter on the wind.
Weeks into this genocide
Felix told me I could say
if I wanted to die.
My throat blossomed with
sobbing before the words
could escape.
Forgive me;
I believed
at the altar of this world
If I could sacrifice enough of myself
I would cleanse the blood
painted across my door frame.
I am trying to believe less.
I am singing Please Stay by Lucy Dacus,
to an outstretched hand and while I once sang to you
I am now singing to myself. This, too,
is breaking my heart. My coworker tells me
she read a memoir of a nurse who asked each dying man
how much we can lose, the answer an echo:
always, always more than we can bear.
I have written
too many prayers to recite in the time we have
and still I hold them crumpled in my left hand,
The carabiner that holds my keys says deliberately alive,
a verse of scripture telling us we are all choosing this.
Come with me now,
through the veil that separates us
and the universes we have lost
Let our death wishes point us toward a home full of ghosts.
Pray it contains every beloved we have and haven’t met.
The crabapple blooms
with whispering of all that we could grow
of ourselves
if only we pressed our ears to the music beneath our feet.
When I listen to the song Hurt Less by Julien Baker
a tender
world softly inhales
in its piano-scarred corners
and words for the care we give our beloveds
transform my ghosts into moonlight shadows.
When the song is done, I tell my therapist
to leave. I want to set fire to
the border of the possible and waft the smoke
into a sky-written blessing.
I sang my first mourner’s kaddish for Palestine and
if there was no God
would I have felt the rhythm sprouting from my bone marrow,
so many disparate breaths joined into one voice,
echoing through the street?
My friends,
you know I’m not a God person but that day
we were germinating a new kind of prayer
and the weed-cracked stones hummed when I called
for a life worth remaining in
from your hands.
I tell my therapist
to trust more
of what I have said
in our twilight moments
is holy.
She is struggling to keep a client alive, and she tells me
what we owe to each other.
always, always more than we can give.
I recite for her every suicide note
I have received
in this lifetime,
a match in my right hand.
a reminder that everything we do is a choice
and we could choose something else.
We have planted a garden with our songs
from the seeds of our shared sorrows
and together we can pluck our future from the vine.
Let our uncertainty tether us to sunlight.
Pray the warmth reaches our dead.
Pray that when they recite our names, they will sing.
To My Friends, on the Day I Turn Twenty-Eight
This is a love story that begins & ends in blood & yes I know by now you must be tired of me
speaking of romance, friends, but stay with me & imagine you are standing on the stage
of an opulent theater with your own bleeding heart cupped in your hands & your knees
are wobbling with fear & you are trying to speak but the only sound that comes is weeping
& you are also sitting in the orchestra section of the theater & the seats are flushed with crimson
& a whisper descends from the balcony in a voice that sounds like your own & you cannot hear
the words & then the house lights dim & you know you do not have much time but still you want
to stand & run to yourself & you want to tell yourself to breath but you know this is not allowed
& dear ones, this is all to say that I re-read my high school journal last week & was reminded
of how heavy the aching felt to hands that didn’t yet know how to hold it & for once as I read
I did not hate the self that seeped through the pages & for once I wanted to tell that self to live
through the years that would follow & hollow out my ribcage beyond even the emptiness
I thought I felt at eighteen because I have learned, now, that loneliness is the seed
from which the outstretched hand sprouts & yearning is the sunlight toward which that hand
reaches for nourishment & grief is how any plant knows that sunlight exists when all it can see
is the moon & if I had not lived the hollow years, then I might not have sprouted & yearned
& grieved enough to meet you & what I didn’t tell you about the theater was that every seat
in the orchestra was full & on stage a chorus of beloveds was holding your heart with you
& the balcony’s whispers were many-voiced & woven with laughter & yes, there are those who
would tear this theater down & build a machine of war in the rubble but they are our enemies
& tonight I do not wish to let them in because the only blood they understand is what they can
bottle & sell but you & I know that what makes its home in our veins is too thick for that, so stay
with me, my beloveds, because it is my birthday and I must thank you before I let you go:
for the beds you made for me to sleep in & the jackets you draped across my shoulders
& the songs you wired into my ears & the plates of food we cleaned together & yes, of course,
for the time spent holding my heart,
always.
Isaiah Newman (they/them) is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area and organizing in solidarity with Palestine. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode Poetry Journal, Joyland, Waxwing, Rust and Moth, and The Lumiere Review. You can find them via their website, isaiahnewman.com.
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