I am thin skin, itchy with boundaries, Pale of Settlement with harsh sun, fierce winds,

unnamed great-grandmothers,

                                          chant prayer of confession, write God's unsayable name,

I am Paris and Rome, swim with my son's remembered laugh, with anemone and starfish,

                                                      track the flight of hawks,

             I am Czernowitz and Shavli,

                                          the grandfather of my grandfather hiding in the space between breaths,

             I am my father's forgotten daughter, too old to be an orphan,

I taste cardamom and saffron,         embrace my mother's ghost,

haunting

my heart tattooed with Mourner's Kaddish, watch my husband in the garden,

                                                      see leaves on the ginko flutter like miniature fans,

             remember my father's fragile voice, my mother's stroke-slurred words,

                                                                                            a hummingbird at the bee balm,

I am cheap apartments and cracked blacktop parking lots,

                                          a grandfather's suicide, Shabbat candles and melted wax,

              I trace constellations and cloud-shadows, dream the songs of my dead,

                            shelter in my husband's arms, his quiet love,

                            I am the pond in the Homewood cemetery, a room of windows, Honeycrisp apples,

                                                                                                          wine dark as a bruise,

grief-shrouded mother of a son with opioid wings, the color of missing,

              I am my dream-heart in its cage of bones.