which makes sense because I had to look up
the word on Google, yiddish for lineage.
My phone knows what I’m looking for,
listens to fragments of conversations,
is definitely reading my emails
to Eddy Portnoy about translations,
phrases you might have spoken
at the kitchenette in the house on 6200.
On my screen the second syllable hovers
next to the first, a gray visitation.
Is this the word you want? I wouldn’t know
a poem from a prayer if it wasn’t for your smirk.
Accent autocorrects to accident, which isn’t one,
even though the word is latin, not yiddish, to move
towards a fall. I find comfort whenever I hear you
in yiddish accidents, a balding man with glasses
looking over the mess he made at the dinner table.
Your language scatters on countertops like seeds.
When my father called you meshegges, my phone
suggested messages. He pretended not to remember
the meaning of shande, the raw untranslated rage
on your face, or the way cancer clawed at your throat
like words we couldn’t place. Even after 35 years,
no one has the chutzpah to really say what they mean.
–
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023) and the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2 (Poets of Queens, 2024). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of Porcupine Literary. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY, with his wife and two daughters.