First Edition features original works by Northern California Jewish writers. Appearing the first issue of each month, it includes a poem and an excerpt from a novel or short story.
Reading Hebrew
by robin ekiss
Birds whistle and beat
the back of my throat
when I try to speak the Kaddish,
mistaking the Reader’s
for the Mourner’s, less beautiful
because it doesn’t mention death.
Other than grief, what purpose
is a language without vowels?
I could read only the words,
couldn’t string together a sentence
to save my life. Some meaning
still eludes: going or coming,
how I refuse to touch
the scrolled script
scribbled on the back of my hand
to cheat the cantillations.
When the cantor starts to sing,
something opens inside me:
sparrows circling in the thin high air
around a minaret — Kaddosh
Kaddosh
Kaddosh —
every word real and separate,
her voice indecorously off
to one side of a note
or another trope,
everything I know
attached to a prayer.
Robin Ekiss is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for emerging women writers, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and author of “The Mansion of Happiness,” which won the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California and California Book Awards. She serves on the executive committee of Litquake, and lives in San Francisco.