Poems from Thorny by Judith Baumel

I: At The Limen

One night we opened the door for Elijah
and he brought instantly to my nose
the rain-green wet, the brown-black-grey-
pink-yellow wet of early spring. There is no red- 
wet--just red light in the eye as he enters the fire.

O: Free Range

All those eggs make one pettish.
O, abundant manufacture
of calcium and protein and package.
The tensile strength, the arch,
of the architectonic oval.
O, obligations of motherhood
all those pre-eggs in the ovary
the moist granary, the storehouse 
of dead futures. Oblate oratory of cackles.
Don’t divagate my hen, it is all your one basket. 

Artist’s Statement

Over the years, my work has become more and more explicit in tracking political disasters and the displacements and disfigurations they create. These poems are part of a sequence called “The American Cousins A-Z,” an experimental fugue of 20th century Jewish American women’s voices which lament, remember and forget.

Judith Baumel is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as president of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. Her books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl and Passeggiate. Her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other places. Her work is represented in a number of anthologies including Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry ; Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice; and Poems of New York (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets). She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the writer Philip Alcabes.