Mahane Yehuda

Photo collage by Sophie Levy

Italics from The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds by Yehuda Amichai

You don’t like smoking in other cities. You take pleasure in buying Friday morning figs from the same spot your tongue first met the lips of someone you would later love, your bodies pressed against graffiti on the shuttered market door in the night. You forgot the names of boys too religious to kiss you in the alleys that smell like fish on ice. The main roads are arteries of an old Eastern heart and the Shabbat crowd sweeps you in like a transfusion. Counting almonds in a bag, you bump into the woman who taught you, seven-thousand miles ago, the word shaked. In che tarzeh harf zadaneh? How could you speak this way?

two tastes / that didn't know each other and became one in our mouth. / And over  the cafe door, next to the sky, it said: / "Not Responsible for Items Forgotten or Lost."

Olive pits in your fist, these memories, plucked from someone else’s tree. An uncle's house with samovar whistling in the kitchen. The clock hands of youth turning so you felt new on each arrival. Shuttered walls that fell open as they raised you. New families moved into your uncle’s house. Their children will kiss in alleys. Tell me again this is not my exile, tell me again I was raised only where I was born.

But where exactly? As in a children's game: / cold, colder, getting warm, warmer, hot, right there. / What shall we do with that old story now, in our own day? / One generation handed it down to the next in the synagogue reading

You can swallow words like “generational trauma” and grow olive trees in your stomach. Dream deferred, memories displaced, fig dried in the sun. Diaspora grew legs, crossed borders with forged papers. The city handed you a suitcase from Tehran with your last name on it and unpacking will take many lifetimes. Anyone can make memories seem like a wet portrait. Drag your finger through my poem, I dare you.

lovers leave fingerprints on each other / plenty of physical evidence, words without end, testimonies, a wrinkled / pair of pants, a newspaper with the exact date, and two watches

The olives are making marks in your palm, chewed dry. You tried to bury them and they called it planting. Where will you put them down? Where can you? Where?

hands severed, hair ripped out, a gash where the mouth used to be / and demanded

what was theirs, theirs, theirs