Memoir​

Issue 17

The rabbi talks of his past lives
about Pleistocenic fish bones that
remind him of his dead daughter:
how magic lanterns erupted like
volcanos, spewing light everywhere.
 
He recounts how he argued in the agora
(with Alcibiades? Archimedes?)—remembers
his hair catching fire while Prometheus wailed
Remembers himself a eunuch in Thebes,
unmanned, hairless keeper of the harem
 
(tells me I was there, kohl-eyed and silken,
asks if I remember, says I smelled of honey then).
 
He recalls standing in the Place de la Concorde,
chanting À bas les tyrans! Vive la réforme above
the trundle of tumbrels over cobblestones,
the shrill whistle he would have heard
as the guillotine ratcheted through its decent,
 
its blade a beguilement of red and silver that
split air that itself oozed a miasma of rot.
He remembers the spectral thrill of deaths
died over and over, each a tableau
presaging the finale yet to come.

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S. L. Wallach appeared recently in Broad River Review, Black Herald Press, Ariel Chart, and Solstice and is forthcoming in The Main Street Rag. Her opera “Elijah's Violin” was performed in San Francisco several years ago. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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