Shira Dentz
Flecks
I don’t know why the transparent, kickball-size ball with shiny multi-colored flecks inside—like a marble—is an emblem of halfwayness, a brokenness still intact, reminding me of something in childhood, or, perhaps, of looking back now at myself then. I got it maybe when I was in fourth grade, or was it earlier? And possibly I was the one who chose it, in a store—don’t remember. Of something lost, muted, or behind-the-scenes. Part smile, part kidnapped, or just very fragile. So fragile it blurs in sunlight, quiet and omnipresent, both exposed and unexposed, like grief. An attempt at play, joy in light’s clarity, and yet crippling, too, like a blinding light, erasing its subjects in an overexposed photo. Again: Is it the way I see myself then, or the way I felt? The colors. I know I was transfixed by the colors—I had this ball for many years and it shrank with time. What was clear scratched in spots, so that it grew thicker and lined, like a skin. Eventually the glints in the ball became more recessed and dulled—though not all. But still, this ball felt like home. I was attracted to the colors I couldn’t access. Maybe because they were safe and not going anywhere. Of course, as the ball shrank it was a partner, reflecting what was shrinking in me.
O
multi-colored erasing
shrinking light’s kickball size
Topaz
< A large topaz ring my grandmother left for me. Dark like her eyebrows, eyes, hair. Cut at hard and clear angles, lines converging into two forthright triangles at the top and bottom. Its protruding, stark angles reminded me of her, pulling my hand to come closer, her gold flashing tooth, accent, dictates, pressing to rush out and yet always a shallowness to her glints. At its center, a cloudiness. Glutted with a milkiness, like a scrap of mouton fur, its underside. Grayish. It was the story of the gray that made me not want to wear it, the pull inside where light combed. I usually love glitter and have no rings or jewelry that I’ve inherited—this, as it has turned out, was my one and only chance. But the afternote of this gray in the large topaz. Sometime very soon afterwards, I let my younger sister have the ring—she wanted it and it looked good on her finger. My sister is the opposite of a wallflower, and at that time I used to say, and believe, that things should be where they’re appreciated the most. >
South
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I read that you can locate south by connecting the two points of a crescent moon, then drawing and extending the line to the horizon: south is where it meets the horizon (except if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, then this nexus is North). So you see, there’s no reason for one to be lost on a night with a crescent moon, as long as one knows in which of the four directions one’s destination (home?) lies.
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A crescent is also a sickle, adorning a slew of countries’ flags. Many date back to the 16th century Ottoman empire. Consensus says sickles represent faith, heritage, and/or independence.
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I might be interested in the crescent moon as an emblem for my home. I’ve been looking for such a figure within which I might place myself to express the incomplete. Though a crescent moon is bound to come full circle, and this story is neither bound nor expected at this point to arrive.
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But I’m most interested in the crescent moon when it’s a yellow jewel, jutting so forthrightly against the night sky it instills a longing to pluck and hold it somewhere for keeping, though first one might crave feeling the prick of its pointy tips on a fingertip, its hard multidimensional body, wondering whether its half circle will be pliable, whether its tips will bend to meet.
(
Crescent bore shape in Latin (to grow, spring up).
Conjoined
metal taste of blood mixes with rainwater down the outside of this window. twist to see through another’s eyes. the pause since I was last hurt by my mother has faded enough, I suppose, to feel it’s time again to check in. a kind of longing? rain like strands of hair, a nice thick mane of it. lush sounds design a screen. instead of air, silver mist // gradually stopping, light opening summer sky
the shade of blue my brother wore in a photo before he died: short-sleeved cotton button-down shirt. we all wore a similar hue. our baby brother supported in the center, now a grown man. doesn’t talk to me. his oldest now is older than I am in the photo session. around this time of year, august—close to when my brother died— six months before my birthday, five before his, and five after our baby brother’s. our sister would be born in three and a half years. now a mom. stays distant too. neither parent is in the photos: our mother in the apartment somewhere, father at work. being the oldest at seven, I hold our baby brother firmly, my brother holds him too, a little more awkwardly. my brother had grown fatter by then from his cocktail of meds, his face bigger, boxy, acned. skin a jaundice glow // halo of a bruise before it heals, translucent sun. the milks and shadows in his green eyes stayed. he was marbled with a different body—but I don’t remember thinking he was different from before—I grew with him inside him. playground and bus kids called him fatso, though if I told them he was dying, they’d feel so guilty they’d never recover from shame so didn’t. they threw pebbles. sometime after he died, alone on the playground, some kids said, where’s fatso? I told them, voice curling into wind as I imagined the whole world crumbling into powder as I spoke.
our mother said she didn’t want to break us up, that’s why I didn’t go to kindergarten. am grateful she did this, but wish he and I weren’t to be my only family unit. the night he died, she asked if I wanted to continue sleeping at the neighbor’s.
summer skies here always the shade of my brother’s shirt //
Yellow, Gold, Amber, or Red
A claw of orange in the sky. Earlier I saw a bird’s claw from the dinosaur age encased in amber, whole—colors, feathers, teeth. There were several photos, and one focused on a maze-like claw that made the bird take off for me, alive, in a prehistoric jungle. Flocks of sprawling predators with bold and brutal shapes. I wanted to keep looking, but a red Habanero flowered in me.
The claw in the sky is rounding the sun’s yolk, spaced out by some clouds, as the sun sets. Time to hold still. Very often (when it’s clear out) sunset’s drama leaves marks on the sky for a while (granted, these are wavelengths of light scattering in Earth’s atmosphere). One can never preserve them, however, with exactitude; not in one’s mind, that is. Not like the memory of shapes on someone’s shirt, for instance.