Linger
thank you for noticing
surrender means disassociation
Bryant Park
Sweet Potatoes and Kale
On Apocalypse and Doom
Twenty-four Hours
Driving to Manhattan on a Friday Morning
Rilke
The sky was pink
It’s the one song I can hear the
words to, maybe because the
couple next to me is karaoke-ing
the song, full blast on glasses
of champagne. I stare out the window
the reflection of the neon red heart
that spells love stares back, the words
backwards and I get lost in the words
of the song released the day before
my birthday the year before I lived
in Bath on a hill of fog and too many
hours in echoey libraries alone with
Dostoevsky. And words that disappeared
into nihilistic rabbit holes and words
of songs that sat with me in the
sadnesses I wore like those lead aprons
placed over you in dentists offices before
they zap you with x-rays and rush out
out to avoid impending doom, sadnesses
that stayed for days and her words
her linger her fool for you got me,
and I didn’t have to explain a damn
thing because someone heard me, and
when she died, I cried. Because I think
I understood her sadness. The kind bigger
than words, the kind that even now
as I stare out a Greenwich Village
lesbian bar while my daughter gets me
a white wine and her a gin and tonic
and the ceiling is covered with rainbow
pinata looking decorations and girls
are making out and the gay couple is
shouting about their new puppy, and
the song has moved on to some poppy
Lady Gaga, I feel a tear start to trickle
down my fifty-five year old face.
I am eating my lunch at a long wooden
table, shared by a man with a tribal
tattoo on his right bicep. He is working on
the NY Times Crossword with a pen,
he taps to the music, when “Take on Me”
comes on. He closes his eyes and mouths
the words, like it’s his song, like it’s the
song that he sang after his first breakup
or reminds him of Junior Prom, the one
he listened to alone in his room. The song
before college stress and adult uncertainty.
Before mom came back from that anniversary
trip to Alaska and said—
your father doesn’t love me anymore. Before
Indigo Girls folk punk that revived. And
Goth, when the electrical twang of the 80s
had the magical power to erase the angst
of growing into a body happening too fast.
Before the Evil Empire fell, when feathered
hair was cool and ripped shirts and bangles
up the arm were all the rage. He plays the
table with his fingers, eyes closed he’s
given up on the Crossword. Are you a musician?
I have to ask and he opens his eyes, surprised
to hear the salad-eating lady at the end of
the table engaging him in conversation. He
smiles a big missing some teeth smile and
says, not of the piano. But thank you for noticing.
Noticing what? I think as I smile, and later
that day at my dance class, I see a man about
my age dancing with his mother. He looks
right into her eyes and they mirror each other,
and their faces light up in exactly the same way,
as if to say, thank you for noticing.
surrender means disassociation
Why not see? Why not ask yourself:
who am I looking for?
Sarah Kay
I am walking in mid-summer, mid-western
green, silent streets, the air thick with wet,
before thunder and rain they expect. So far
from the dust I call home. But haven’t, for
months. Home, where I wipe down
books twice a day, floors more—heavy
with salt and Negev. Here all lush, no fear
of Southern California fines for flushing
too much or watering daisies in drought. Here,
a river gushes down the street as sprinklers
spray Hydrangeas, moments before a storm.
I am listening to a podcast on manifesting.
And I’m all in. Until she says—surrender.
And though I consider myself spiritual, something
about surrender buckles my knees. This word
that means in the lexicon of me—disassociation.
Bruises on my backside and scars on the inside.
Hiding in closets and praying for a savior that
never came. And—it isn’t until October 9, 2023
sitting in the patio of a restaurant. Taking a break
with strangers after stirring pasta for
soldiers down south, sharing how we are coping
when someone uses the word—surrender, and
a psychologist who says she’s from New York
shoots up and says—
you’re not supposed to surrender when you are at war.
That it all – all of a sudden – made sense. Not just
the shakes and sweats and heartbeat in my throat.
Or perceiving sirens and lights in the sky. Not just
the angry man with a beer in his hand. Not just
the tall one with a hollow face and leaden feet. Who
sought me at night. Who found me in the dark places
I’d hide. Where I’d escape to feel safe. To be able to
shut my eyes. At night. And then, try in the light of
day to stop looking over the crick in my neck and
bow my complicit head in—surrender. Instead, on
this mid-western mid-summer mid-morning in
near-rain I can almost taste, I crick my neck up,
sip in the softness of green and the safety of
sidewalks and the beginnings of a sprinkle becoming a storm.
It is the middle of May, I
sit in the middle of Bryant
Park nearing dusk and it
feels like mid-day. A kind
of soft waiting, that
calm before the storm
feeling. Maybe it’s the gray
clouds just in the distance
or the weather app that
promises rain in
exactly sixty-seven
minutes. Still I left
my umbrella at home.
I wanted free hands,
to swing as I walk
up and down Fifth.
I sit next to an old woman
all in white, literally
all in white, from her
hair to her shoes and
I want to imagine her
angelic till I see her
face, all a growl. Perusing
the landscape, and I
imagine she is finding
a gazillion things wrong
with this generation. Or
maybe she is just squinting
in the light that slants
at a particular angle just
at this particular hour. I
could read that political
novel or call that person
I’m supposed to call, or
listen to that new podcast
episode about the war, but
I don’t. I sit. Peruse
like the lady in white.
Listen to the band testing
their mics. I think I am
learning to listen. Of course
to my adult children who
are beyond wanting
anything that hints of
advice, but really I mean
to me. And it’s not easy,
like when the kids were
little and we’d visit Baba
in San Diego, play in the
sand and sift through
soppy sand to find the perfect
shell. Above the chatter
of my mind I hear the chatter
of a little girl asking for ice cream,
and the girlfriends to my right
discussing evening plans and
an old guy just across the
walkway tell his story, how
he kicked cocaine, got off the
streets, and now works with
kids. And I think he knows
I am listening because he
turns to me and smiles.
We try not to slide down the rusty
rickety stair of the sketchy change
that is only slightly sketchy, requires
exiting one station walking a few
blocks under roaring subway tracks
that looks more movie-set than
real, like I’m sure I’ve seen this exact
place in a cop show where the car
chase ends and there’s a stand-off
and one car explodes or you find out
the good cop was actually the evil
bad guy all along or they find a baby
behind a trash can. But it’s daytime
and easier than the non-sketchy-change
and we’re tired and it’s late already
at 8:15 in the morning for our
appointment to check out an
apartment. She asks what vegetable
I would be, if I were a vegetable, I scan
my brain, her question prefaced with,
I don’t want to talk about anything—
important. And I don’t tell her I
am on her side, my mind already
a mush before this morning, before
the Union Square protests and the LA
Riots that are no longer just in LA. And
missiles. Still. And a war. Still.
Lacinto kale I say, because it
is soft because you can cook
it and juice it and eat it raw
because it is a superfood and
she agrees and I remember the
tahini-dressing she made the last
time I visited and wonder if she
can make it tonight. I’m a sweet potato
she says and I see her crispy cumin
baked sweet potatoes she’d make
in our Midwestern kitchen and her
sweet potato latkas from Hannukas past
and the sweet potato fries we’ll maybe
order tonight at the café down the street.
With a glass of wine. Where we’ll
sit in sweats and clink glasses and
talk about more things that make
us laugh and take up space in our
already overcrowded minds.
Back when I was a Christian, and spent
the spring of my senior year in college
sitting on the deck of that New Zealand
exchange student—whose name I can’t
remember—smoking cloves and wearing
black. Back when I was trying to get a degree
in literature in too sunny Southern California
where everyone was blonde but me and
spent their days catching waves. Back
when I wrote about death, and angst
found its way into every diary entry.
Back when I had more in common with
Poe and Plath than the freckle-faced
New Zealand girl. But she was pretty
and had dark hair. And smiled and didn’t
surf and I wanted to know why she was
happy all the time. And I wondered if it
was because she studied math and sat with
numbers, while I spent mine with Raskolnikov
and Hester. The Scarlet Letter that kept
me up at night. And thirty years later
my Jewish daughter, same age I was
then, calls with questions of apocalyptic
doom, do I think we are in a nosedive to
destruction, and I hear all the fear and
questions too big for a small soul. She
talks about the mayoral election and crime
on the subway, rent and stabilization. And
wars…but interrupts to say her friend
got a job at a local bagel place. And she
met a new friend with curly brown hair
and she likes the kids at her job on the
Upper East Side where she teaches art
and today, one little girl all of five
five made her day when she tilted her
head up to my girl, not so little but
still mine and said she was pretty, and
her heart turned to mush and these kids
give her hope, and I don’t say she’s answered
her own question, and maybe mine too,
about apocalypse and doom. With a
few little words from a few little girls.
Only with our hands can we illumine you. The mind is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world.
Ranier Maria Rilke
Even New York is asleep. At a little
after 4, jet lag and the need for caffeine
and words, I’m up. Trying to understand.
This morning I read Larry Levis. Another
Californian. And drink hot coffee in my
daughter’s apartment. Strong, hoping
the machine doesn’t wake her, less than
24 hours here and I float. Yesterday
on the subway I am surprised to hear
so much English, then remembered I am
in America, my ear accustomed to
tune out the white noise of a language
I still struggle to learn. But here, the
country of my birth, my home, this
should be easy, I say to myself in
that non-language voice of the mind.
But I’m gaslighting myself, if that’s even
a thing. This is not easy. Not the
subway, not the in between, not the protest
I saw yesterday in a square on the way
to meet my daughter. Shouting death
to the country I arrived from. Shouting
workers of the world unite. Students
who remind me of the young people
I marched with in Russia in the 90s. We
didn’t know what we were marching
for, I was reading Dostoevsky and thinking
about the soul. And still think about
the soul, and wonder if these students
do too. And later that day I make my
way to dance south of Houston where
the teacher asks us to imagine a lava lamp,
to let it all fall out, and I think of
the 24 hours I’ve lived and the worlds
traversed and finally in the multi-colored
goopiness of the lava lamp in my mind
I can begin to breathe into the next day.
Driving to Manhattan on a Friday Morning
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe
but not the catastrophe.
-Frannie Choi
It’s just after 7 am and I am
driving a packed rented SUV
up to New York and hoping
Google Maps works in this car
and hoping the heavy skies
don’t unleash precipitation. Right
at this moment—I mean, I could
handle a few drops here or there
but a full-on monsoon would be
too much. Today, when, let’s be
honest, I’m barely keeping it
together. I scan my brain for
some diagnosable source and
then treat and wonder if it’s
the lack of sleep or bad bitter
gas station coffee. Or maybe it’s
driving alone from DC to NY
or leaving my husband for what?
A few days? None of this makes
any sense. Why I’m a mess. In
some sort of pre-verbal age when
all the cries for attention are
ignored only to come out decades
later when you’re driving to NY.
And I wonder if the real problem
is that I’ve read too many self-help
books with ten-step guides to fix your
life and transform your trauma into—
I don’t know, something usable,
or manageable, which might work
for maybe about seven and a half
minutes till you worry whether
you have enough cash and coins
for all the tolls in all the states
you’ll drive through. And you
scream-ask the windshield why
they have tolls anyway? Why
can’t they just raise taxes, but
then you remember that you
don’t even pay takes here.
Because you live in another
country. Where there is a war.
And then you drive in silence,
surprised that the tolls are cheap.
And the sky, while a thick-heavy-grey
never rains. And five hours later
when you’re driving up West 53rd
to drop off the car, you find yourself
honking and swerving, like a
regular New Yorker. And then
you see a poster and remember
the war and feel grateful for 5
hours or maybe a bit less, when
you could forget.
Walking down Rothschild, I listen to
Leon Bridges sing about rivers. I miss
my mother who lives nowhere near a
river. The streets still asleep feel sad.
Like the loneliness I woke with. And
tried to cure with sweet black coffee
and Rilke, the poet who diagnosed
his solitude as the greatest sadness
of his life. I pass an outdoor café, just
beginning to open and wonder—in
another time and place—if Rilke and I
would have been friends. Sipping our
coffees at Café Slavia in Prague. Quoting
Faust and debating spirituality. Versus
materialism. Smoking long cigarettes
that would burn our eyes. We would share
our latest creations and I would say
fabulous and he would pause a long
pause and say try this or that. I
imagine, nearly tripping over a yellow
stone on a street that makes me think
of Paris. Or Prague. And Rilke. With
its bougainvillea purples and its
blue doors and graffiti and the tabby
cat, walking alone just like me.
This morning—our last for
a while and I walk earlier
than usual. To leave time for
all the things you do when you
leave. I am good at leaving. Not
as good at arriving—the not-quite
here and not-quite there—
soft with its non-committal
cotton-candy promises, sticky
hopes, clouds in the sky. So
much easier than the hard-tarmac
landing. The I am here now so
best to put down roots landing.
Sign on the dotted line in black
ink—landing. Not pink
like the sky this morning.
Before lawn mowers and dog
walkers and cement truck and
lawn crews. And six hours later
I am sitting in another airport
lounge. Drinking my fourth cup
of too-bitter stale coffee and
wondering when I’ll sleep.
And where. And what day it is.
And if the sky will be pink there too.
Tara Zafft is a poet whose work explores themes of motherhood, belonging, and personal and collective trauma. Her work has appeared in anthology, Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press. In 2024, she was awarded the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. Tara holds a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and a Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK.
