"You are the Monsters"

My grandfather, an orthodox rabbi, was born in Palestine, but spent most of his life in the United States. After raising a family here and seeing more than a dozen grandchildren growing up, he returned to live out the remainder of his life in Israel. Two of his sons and a number of grandchildren and great grandchildren followed. All told, more than a hundred descendants lived there the last time my parents visited.

I have never traveled there. I have never had any desire to go other than to visit family, especially as I learned more and more about the Nakba, Israel's apartheid, genocidal settler expansion, and attempts to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous Palestinian population over the past three-quarters of a decade.

Israel's atrocities have accelerated over the past year and I express my disgust, detestation, and despair in my poetry. You can read one of those poems, "You are the Monsters", in the inaugural issue of Defiance & Dialogue (page 6) from The Blunt Space, a "hub for art, advocacy, and culture" where being blunt is a movement, "where we defy the rules" to be "authentically creative without choosing between our art, our culture, or our mission." The first issue "is dedicated to individuals and communities fighting against societal imperialism and oppression."

Note: as an anti-Zionist Jew I very much understand (having personally experienced the latter) that Anti-Zionism ≠ Anti-Semitism.

"Mourning" (a Fibonacci)

The Autumn 2024 Issue of Panoplyzine, a literary zine featuring "a wide-ranging and impressive array of writing", includes my Fibonacci poem, "Mourning". (Cover Image: Photo by Amanda Pope)

Fibonacci poems are based on the Fibonacci mathematical sequence: each line has the number of syllables that are the sum of the previous two lines. Although named after an Italian mathematician, the sequence was first described by Indian mathematicians a millennia earlier.

Panoplyzine offers "a fresh new look at poetry and short prose", publishing "lively new insights in creativity, outlook, perspective, and analysis."