A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Mikveh, After the Test Results
The attendant lowers her eyes,
as if modesty could shield the water.
I step down tiled stairs:
white steps blued by years of bodies
seeking what cannot be certified.
The report says trace amounts
not enough to forbid immersion,
enough to name:
polyethylene, residue, drift.
I cup water to my ears,
listen for the old instructions:
gather yourself, loosen your breath,
enter whole.
Somewhere upstream
a factory exhales into the river.
Downstream, a woman like me
holds her knees and sinks.
The blessing stalls in my throat.
What enters me enters history.
What washes me does not leave.
I submerge anyway.
Faith, too, has thresholds
it cannot test for.
David Anson Lee
David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet whose work explores ethical inheritance, embodiment, and environmental loss through Jewish ritual, cultural memory, and lyric witness. His poems have appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Silver Birch Press, Eunoia Review, The Orchards, Braided Way, and elsewhere. He lives in Texas.
