A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
How Many Tears Can a Woman Cry Before She Has No Tears Left?
This is a trick question.
Like, “If a rooster laid an egg
on the top of a roof, which way
would the egg roll?” Or, “How many
animals did Moses take on the ark?”
There is no right answer
because the question itself
is wrong. How can we number
the sum of a woman’s tears
if she never stops crying?
Psalm 56:8 says God stores
our tears in a bottle. It must be
a bottle the size of a planet,
a universe, a gigantic black hole.
This is a metaphor, of course.
There is no bottle that big.
Maybe there is no bottle at all.
Maybe God is a poet and this
is His way of saying he sees
our pain, that our tears matter
that despite being countless,
each one counts for something.
God keeps track of our sorrows,
writes them down in a book.
This is how we know for sure
God is a poet—with his metaphors
and his bottle of tears and his book
of sorrows. We know He somehow
sees fit to save our tears instead of
dry them. We just don’t know why.
Marissa Glover
Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she spends most of her time sweating or swatting mosquitoes. Recent work can be found in Rattle, Rust + Moth, and Whale Road Review. Marissa’s first full-length poetry collection, Let Go of the Hands You Hold, was released by Mercer University Press in 2021. Her second collection, Box Office Gospel, will be published by Mercer in 2023.
