Some stories are just too amazing not to be told. In Judy Batalion’s Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters In Hitler’s Ghettos, she uncovers the incredible stories of brave young women during the Holocaust. In the midst of horror, these women banded together and formed a deadly militia in which they called themselves, the “Ghetto Girls.” The book begins with a powerful and heartbreaking quotation taken from a song about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and written by a young Jewish girl before her death: “With graves on street corners, Will outlive her enemies, Will see the light of days.”
The women in Light of Days had unwavering courage that allowed them to choose the more difficult and honorable path, to fight the Nazi regime.…
O, what a face full of things: With cigarette in mouth and with fear Sometimes transparent tongues of heat at my thighs—
Such longings: Errant. Verdant. Yes, when the signs of summer thicken, like bees, and I lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
Thus I: faltering forward, endlessly. Your voice on the telephone. I mean the bees in my body are restless again and set out to find you.
(lines from A.D. Hope, Roberto Bolaño, S. Ben Tov, Seamus Heaney, C.D. Wright, Rudyard Kipling, May Swenson, Albert Goldbarth, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Holly, Paisley Rekdal, Yehuda Amichai)
The worst heatwave on record arrived the summer I turned nine. It showed up on a Sunday morning, like a traveling evangelist preaching fire and brimstone. Even the air was angry. The sky bruised over in grey and green, but rain never came. My mother opened all the windows to try and catch a breeze, even the one in my bedroom, where the screen was torn and gaped open like the mouth of a jack-o-lantern. It didn’t help much. Carrie had already asked twice if we could turn down the A/C.
“It’s not working right now. My mom said she’s going to call someone tomorrow,” I smiled.
The lie was almost a reflex. Born of my knowledge that Carrie’s house shivered with artificial air in the summer.…
So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power…? —W.B. Yeats
On the last day of high school, I went into the alley to say goodbye to Big Al. It was late afternoon, lowering clouds, the sort of sky Mom had always called “the farmer’s friend.” Jimmy Collins—Jim, as he’d been insisting I call him since October, but I liked Jimmy, name and boy, because it contained “my Jim”—Jimmy had told me the word for that atmosphere: crepuscular. We gifted each other new words like treats. I’d said crepuscular sounded like an unseemly growth, it even has puss in it. Jimmy liked that but gently mocked, “Unseemly, eh?” and pretend-punched my shoulder.…
In the year of my birth, a mammal preserved in amber was identified by scientists for the first time. When they spoke of its age, the scientists broadly estimated 18 million to 29 million years—referring, of course, to the age of the fossil itself. What I’m curious about is how long the tiny mammal lived, how much time was cut short when it fell indelibly into the resin. There’s simply no way to know. I know that in hindsight its lifespan seems ludicrously insignificant. An eon spent in amber turns the time before preservation into something like prehistory, like a half-life, or less.
Back in the waning years of the last millennium when pages were turned, books were read, and people gathered together in real space and time for socially un-distanced discussions, my literary path to demise began. As common with most closely kept confessions, this is not something I discuss openly with my literati buddies.
I would like to blame it on the likes of Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt, even Carolyn Forché and other enlightened writers but that would be tremendously unfair to them. Clearly, I had the rotten luck of stumbling into a highly actualized group of readers during a time when I had barely enough wherewithal to find a suitable clean, dry blouse to wear. Having given birth to my second baby within two years only a week previous, I agreed to join my gracious neighbor Nancy’s book club meeting at her house one dark Midwestern winter evening.…
After swapping inner voices with me, all you say is, “Everything is so much softer.”
Which I take to mean quieter and gentler—the kind of change you were hoping for.
Then, all smiles and bright eyes, you thank me and head off to take care of other Saturday plans. I linger on the park bench, to get Aeterna’s take on the new arrangement.
“Thanks for helping out,” I think to her, using her voice as we agreed I would. “How does it feel so far?”
“Like I’m hearing myself or who I once was,” she answers in my mind with your inner voice. “How do I sound?”
“Firm,” I answer. “Like bark—tough and furrowed.”
“I hope it’s just bark and no bite,” she quips—though only half successfully with your inner voice dampening her usual levity to a low-key seriousness.…
