A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
The Scorched Forest Radiates
"Their hopes, unbandaged,
are gaping, and they will die of them."
—Yehuda Amichai
In this scorched forest the rule is no hope, no chosenness. Count the houses bombed and burned count the children hunted then held in blue metal: they jump at each report, they sleep on some cold floor, their food infested, they shout like gunshot, the metal of their strength is a glow of blue. She holds her hands in prayer when she doesn’t understand the morning and no words will make any sense. She bows her head, says, Thank you, very much. As the sirens gleam her mother shoves her down, covers her body with her own: all moments crack as the bombs explode and are repaired unevenly none of the lines match and nothing makes sense locked in a basement in a tunnel as the world burns above her what does she leave behind the memories or life itself fear eventually melts into wonderment her body to womanhood—three took her or more, their blue gleamed as it glowed into flames. It glows.
Rachel Neve Midbar
Poet, essayist, translator, and Fulbright Scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection, Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020), was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize). Her poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Stained: An Anthology of Writing about Menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023), poetry editor at Judith Magazine, and her scholarly work, Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem, is due out from Palgrave MacMillan in 2026. You can find out more at rachelnevemidbar.com.
