From our current Faith issue.
For you Portlanders (or those with private jets who fly around the country for literary events), Alicia will be reading this Thursday at our Holocene party.
WE LEARN TO BE HUMAN
I attended the online seminar on shame
it helped for a minute
more importantly I’ve been loving
the goddess for a long time and these
hiccups in my groin are a sign
she’ll be there when it’s time
it could be next week it could be
a month you started as a seed
and now in a white t shirt
you go to bed I’ll meet you
when I’m done we learn to go to bed
to put on eyeliner we learn to be human
when we don’t get what we want
you too started as a seed my son and now
I feel your fingers curling against my
center from the inside
like a fern dear son I want every flower
you ever plant to blossom
Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, composer, performer and Torah teacher. Her poetry book, DIVINITY SCHOOL, won the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, her one-woman chamber-rock opera, was named one of Portland’s best theatre performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week. Alicia lives in Portland with her husband and their two small children