Poetry

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

I am not yet dead. Do not call this miracle or raise your hands in praise. First, 
you should know how long I prayed, and how I came to know the silence of the Lord.

That summer night, we gathered again around the table,
drinking with all the bugs that lit up and some that didn’t.
When Mike said: I wonder how my ex-wife is doing

Celia Dropkin’s poems are erotically frank and emotionally unabashed, deeply engendered, relentlessly truthful. Like songs, they are terse and musical and carefully constructed to explode with maximum impact. They reveal the relationships between women and men in a way that was unprecedented in Yiddish literature.