Jennifer Wolkin
The Birth of a Thousand Clichés
You, a broken heart, can
lean toward cliché
especially when you start
breaking into a thousand pieces
uncontained & unctuous
oozing platitudes like
fragments of death or a breakup
or an unrequited love.
In a poem you’re too
melodramatic. Even my mentor
mentioned that writing My
heart just broke into a
thousand pieces is over the
top. I agree, but I’m also
too tired to search my brain
for a thousand possible
metaphors to describe the way
losing someone who I never
even met disjointed me—
how when the doctor said You
can’t have children because
your ovaries are empty
all thousand pieces of you
dropped into my uterus—
how then those thousand
clichés took to banging against
a wall of organ protruding
like a fistula from places
where a fetus will never kick.
A sonogram of a uterus filled
with your scattered pieces
sounds like a bass
guitar being played
underwater: muffled &
muddled into an oblivion of
baritone fluid. It’s a miracle,
at least, how you can
break but still beat
anywhere all thousand
shards
land.
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh
In my other life, I marry a man, my high school sweetheart, have his babies, and move five minutes from where I grew up. We send our kids to a modern yeshiva, where they learn both Judaic and English studies. I cook us dinners, kugel and cholent, and we go to shul on Shabbos to pray with our community who wouldn’t dare welcome the woman who I am now, in this life, because I’d be known as a spinster, not having been betrothed yet, only educated, which in yet another life would be completely unheard of, if I married the man I met in Israel, a Breslov Chasid from Tsfat, a place I still go to in this life, in my dreams, because the Lecha Dodi this Chasid would daven as the Friday sun set over the city still moves me even though I don’t know how to reconcile this image, because it also contains my children, boys with big white knitted yarmulkes and long payot calling me Ima, eagerly telling me about the parsha of the week. Those children wouldn’t have played with the children I might have had in this life had I not been barren, so clearly blessing less. The woman I am in this life grieves in the arms of her partner, sad, but wholly holy, holy.
Jennifer Wolkin is a health and neuro psychologist, speaker, mental health advocate, and mindfulness-meditation practitioner. She just started her MFA in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College and couldn't be happier about pursuing this dream.