Ash Wednesday
On Ash Wednesday a priest
by Trinity Church
offers gray dust,
and his robes are so very clean.
he’s older than all of New York,
than all of the world.
Teenaged exorcists look
out from a glossy magazine cover
and in my spam e-mail
a psychic tries to feed me,
says she can find me if I’m lost.
Even the panhandler on Wall Street
and his cardboard sign
("everything seems so hard")
dips from collective
desperation, asks to hold my soul,
give me something to float on—
or post to Instagram
so my friends can see it too.
A woman on the sidewalk
"falls out with the spirit."
It’s personal
and her tongues
are different from mine.
Mine don’t speak; I just hear:
voices at the door, a siren child,
messages to get out while hostage,
how to dial 9-1-1 without being seen.
The girls at First Church
pulled nails from their mouths
and hair; I think about them
while accepting a prayer card
on the subway, a coin pressed
into my hand, turning green.
The priest’s white hair alarms me,
and the clairvoyant has died.
The panhandler is still there
as the summer pulls to an end
and the teenaged exorcists
sleep in, in, in.
I'mnot a believer, but I can write
about the devil.
Divers
New England witches were especially fond of yellow birds. The drowned oxen: blamed on your neighbor. And inside your neighbor's yawning mouth: the devil's mark. Today the street is full of yellow birds and ghosts. I'm not in New England, though, I'm in a southern California beach town. Above the pointed pink roofs we see sky divers. "Mine," my mother says, "Ours. From the hill." Meaning, she's seen them before from higher land. From here, you of course can't see the divers' faces or bodies. Just that they are falling, from yellow parachutes.
Tetrahedra
We rediscover the shadows
at noon: perfect
double triangles.
When the gristle in our noodle
soup looks like a sparrow's foot,
my sister finds a breadloaf-sized
chunk of beach quartz
and leaves it, for the telling.
When a dried reed looks
like a frog,
A wide-eyed boy finds
the beach quartz
and absconds with it.
When the thing in our soup
is a sparrow's small, pointed foot,
the shadows point to
two halves of one
broken geode.
When the shadows point
ahead, across an empty road,
we find empty sand.
Jackie Sherbow is a writer and editor living in Jackson Heights. Her poems have appeared in Day One, The Opiate, and Bluestockings Magazine, and have been part of the NYC-based Emotive Fruition performance series. She works as an editor for two leading mystery-fiction magazines (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) as well as Newtown Literary Journal, the literary journal dedicated to the borough of Queens.