Photo by Alicia J. Rose
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Sunday School
Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,
which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.
Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know
whether it is living or being lived
It happened again on the way here:
a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.
This is a different way of being a woman,
which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now
something must cry look at me, look at me!
And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.
Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.
I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,
it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;
and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because
although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,
crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching
to be popped in the mouth and tasted
(and they offer it as such)
soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.
All the fucking in the world never erases desire,
and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.
So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.
And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,
just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,
offering ourselves up for this one day:
offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday
like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read
and left behind on the cafe table,
leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.
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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.”
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Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.
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