Bodega | Meleke, the Royal Stone, a White Coarse Crystalline Limestone

Meleke, the Royal Stone, a White Coarse Crystalline Limestone

a teenager at the Wailing Wall I pushed a pinched scrap into a crack

the width of God a millimeter thick

handwritten a note that asked God/wall

to quarry back from stone my father’s legs

I bent my forehead to the sandstone cool and wept God/self

a cistern in the quarry in the evening my friends and I swayed

singing let brothers sit together the desert breeze dry as dust

the Jerusalem air crown-daisy cupped faces the way it sifts around our skin

looking back I know childish melodies the whole world

a very narrow bridge our foolish glow our cheeks like domes shining

shevet achim and the main thing is to have no fear at all

but the cobbled streets/God and crowds gam yachad and reflections

in gold inhaled exhaled prayer

Josette Akresh-Gonzales is working on her first book and was a finalist in the 2017 Split Lip Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Pinch, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. You can find her on Twitter @Vivakresh.

90 – February 2020

By Josette Akresh-Gonzales

Meleke, the Royal Stone, a White Coarse Crystalline Limestone