For Avi
Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu al netilat yadayim.
The apple, half-eaten, revolved, caught by a current and a hard place. He sank. He with the prayer book and melted eyes, a history of mitzvot. I could not picture it, not even its shadow, not even al basari, or how the Bedouin woman became a body to be fished out of a well of washed up dreams or how some people are dissolved without translation. The Arabic mother and daughter sat in the wine-dark Mediterranean, the waves buckling into belly laugh, soaking their hijabs, their long pajama shirtsleeves (to be pitied by the Jews). In the language in which everything is a prayer, rinse clean: all things end in walls.
Amen.
Jessica Brofsky is a recent graduate of Cornell University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in After Happy Hour Review, Marginalia, and Notes.