In the fire
Astonish, I will continue, this people with
wondrous, behold this people, I will, with wondrous
astonishment, wisdom, the wise of its wisdom,
the wisdom of its wise, lost, lost. The understanding
of its men of understanding, the men who understand
and their understandings, the men who understand
their understandings, the men who understand
they understand, the understanding men and their
understandings [insert , wisdom insert , Women] the Women
and their men of understanding, the Women who
understand the men, this understanding, theirs and theirs,
of each other and themselves—astonishment. I will
continue to astonish them, the Women and men, and they
will understand and they will know of their understandings
until all is hidden. And hidden is forgetting, and
they will forget they ever understood.
New Prophets
We are finding the borders
of land, guilt, nation, love, borrowed
memory, we borrow land
as we borrow memory—take it and run.
The art thief leaves the walls seared
red, rare to leave a trace, faintly
on trains I see ghosts of history
in a briefcase left on the seat, children
were shuttled, are
shuttled across with tokens
strewn in their wake, footsteps
to the garden don’t leave
a trace. We are left […]
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Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher pursuing a PhD in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her poetic and historical work explore diasporic memory and the ways in which literary and historical works transmit the past. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember
(Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, The Journal,
and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater,
and is forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
. She is finishing a poetry manuscript which emerges from the language and myth of the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, and reaches towards the possibilities and impossibilities of desire. She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence. See rachel-kaufman.com for more.
“In the fire” originally appeared with Ayin Press, in Otiyot.
