Rebecca Handler

If I were a poet, I’d write about the dry-cleaning woman who was kind to my daughter and her bell-bottomed jeans that needed hemming. I’d write about the crow that waited on the sidewalk like a father forced to go shopping. But what about the man wanting a dollar for a coffee but how does anyone buy a coffee for a dollar in a town with eight-dollar donuts? If I were a poet, I’d stretch the word conflict to spill over the page and I’d rhyme words and phrases like antisemitism and no place for them. This morning, after the hemming, the patient crow, and the coffee incident, two freshly laundered Mormon boys in skinny black ties asked if I had time for a story. I said no thank you I’m Jewish. What I didn’t say was that today, on Irving Street, I am more Jewish than I’ve ever been, and my grandmother didn’t escape the Holocaust with my father, his baby brother, and diamonds in the sole of her shoe for all the who-said-whats. But maybe that’s exactly why she did. Because someday she’d have a granddaughter named in her memory who would still feel the hatred of Jews in the words people toss around without an eight-dollar morsel of understanding. If I were a poet, I’d fill a page with commas to look like tears, make a million copies, and hand them to slogan-lovers and say here, burn this instead.