Author: Janie Braverman

  • Blood Line

    Enshrouded in black velvet despair
    she drew silver-sharp paring knife
    from dark kitchen drawer.

    Inside her wrist
    pressed blade to blue line
    crowbarred the sharp leading edge of pain
    away from her heart
    filled with ground glass of broken dreams.

    Bright blood laced
    with diamond bits of glass
    her life (and the color in her face)
    drip
    drip
    dripped
    to the floor.

    When ebbing pain brought
    ebbing despair
    she reached down
    dipped her finger in blood
    and wrote me this poem.

  • Witch’s broom

    in the rat-rustling night
    snakes shimmied down
    scorched      charred      and scathed
    tumbling from a blood-red moon
    older than anything but the stones

              in the trampled mud      littered with chips of the trees
              cypress      yellow poplar      elm      and palmetto

    falling away under the migration of stars
    the snakes sharpen themselves on iron and rock
    moving at the speed of heartbreak and loneliness
    avoiding the soupy grass
    crossing the unreliable earth
    past the marsh and the trough

              branches thick or thin      gnarled or straight
              rooted in the source of all rivers

    the dogs and dogwoods could not stop quivering
    the doves weren’t there
    the salamanders gone
    we must all be resistant to disease and evil
    take ginger      wear garlic      remember the subjunctive
    don’t forget to shift the mood

              short-leaf pine and hemlock
              apple      palm      eucalyptus      cedar

    take a far dive away
    maps are allowed
    maps that will tell you where to board the dreamline
    how to live with ambiguity and nuance
    but never how to live without trees

    hear the wild melancholy wail
    cleaving the wind from the sky
    you will be swept clean
    along the growling early dawn

              chinaberry      prickly pear      walnut pecan
              burdock and nettle      the single-leaf ash

    think of the life you might have lived
    had you allowed yourself to live on tree time

              the peach      the apricot      the cherry and plum

  • A Meditation on Memory and Morocco

    She asked her brother, Do you remember being in Morocco and taking this photo of you and me? It’s not a traditional selfie, this photo of the oldest and the youngest of the siblings, this photo in a plain white frame, their heads close together, both of them smiling, the resemblance more striking than usual in the flat north African sun. This photo was taken with her 35mm camera, her favorite for travel, her second favorite when she’s working. He had held the camera. She had clicked the shutter. We had been in Morocco on a family trip.

    On the printed itinerary, it was a synagogue trip, but the gravitational weight of our family made it our trip. Six of us out of perhaps nineteen travelers. How different our memories must be from those who traveled solo in our group.

    She asked, Do you remember?

    So, what is memory when autoimmune encephalitis has ravaged and atrophied part of your brain? Or, perhaps, the better question is where is memory.

    Do you remember?

    Shake of head no.

    At this, I am not surprised. He had already ‘said’ as much to me, a puzzled shake of head no. What happened next says as much about family memory as it does about her love for him.

    She said, That’s ok. I remember for you.

    And that’s what we say now, and what we do now, when the memory is inaccessible to him via any direct route. We are unwilling to say the memory is gone; we don’t know; we may never know; even as he heals, even as his brain rebuilds, we may never know. It’s part of what we do now, to continue to remember for him, to continue to remind him.

    We say, That’s ok. We remember for you.