Haya's Poetry

Teething in Captivity

For so long, hope and dread lived

side by side. Now, hope is a melted popsicle

left behind in a playground.

Did you see the ginger cherubs cocooned

in a blanket, swaddled to their mother’s chest?

Did you see her mouth with its silent scream?

Since October 7th, I’ve had three root canals.

My dentist says he has never seen such a bad case

of bruxism, the grinding of my teeth and clenching

of my jaw. There are bite marks on my mouth guard.

Kfir Bibas was likely teething in captivity.

Maybe he was given a soothing toy made from a damp washcloth with a chilled carrot stick or frozen apple.

Disney wallpaper and a play kitchen were found

in a bedroom tunnel for terrorists’ children.

I’m told the final identification of baby Kfir

was complicated - he was stolen before his teeth grew.

Survival

is a chocolate chip cookie
served by a retired Iraqi Jewess
to a quintet of grenade-toting terrorists,
one of whom wears a smiley face T-shirt.

A mural of Rachel Edri as Rosie the Riveter
covers a large wall in hipster Florentin, Tel-Aviv.
She distracted the terrorists—from fourteen
to twenty hours—depending on who you ask.

The story has become layered, like shawarma
on a spit. Perhaps Rachel served them walnut kleicha
in the kitchen, scented with nutmeg and cumin.
And they didn’t rest in the salon on newly upholstered furniture.

There is room to believe that she wrapped the wounded hand of a terrorist, the one with peach-fuzz above his lip.
As the tale unfolds, she may have massaged his forearm, and spoke to him like a son.

It’s both disturbing and comforting

that Rachel looks like my dead mother - the same orange brassy hair, buxom in their ill-fitting floral tops. I imagine this duo as neighbors, the Lucy and Ethel of Ofakim, yelling in their thick voices, fighting over who had the best counter-terrorism baked goods.

Chutzpah

was once a country, where a woman
with angry bracelets bit the forearm
of a balding man - she insisted he cut the line
for the tramway to Masada. This is where we fought
enemies, not each other. I miss this hard woman
with the aubergine hair, this soft man
who laughed at the teeth marks.
Welcome to Israel, he said.
This was a lifetime ago.

Return From Reserve Duty

Sergeant returns as abba
A bulletproof vest, replaced by a baby carrier
A canteen traded for a Mickey sippy cup

A helmet becomes a kippah
Gunfire is the matkot ball at the beach
Trigger blisters bruise the ripened peach

The imprints of fingers on everything—ghost's tips

Trance Festival

At 6:29 a.m., on the Simchat Torah holiday, there was on odd shift from Woodstock trance—the sway of sweat-lathered bodies—to freeze dance. This was followed by a run for their lives. My friend, Alma, did not have time to thread the laces into the seven rows of eyelets on her Doc Martens. She recalls sprinting through a field, slipping on blood, surprised at its slickness on her bare feet. Alma was outsmarting a carnival water-gun game which had taken
out the people around her. Rescued hours later, she was found in a bed of clotted blood. She does not remember the metallic smell. She did not realize
that she had been shot. Each time we speak, Alma tells the same worry: she will never know in whose blood she lay. The mingling of her blood with that of strangers plagues her. The trauma expert says we, all of us, have the same bloodline Alma thinks of Isaac and Esau—had they shared their birthright like the splitting of a falafel sandwich, perhaps this would have been a peace festival after all.