Mónica Gomery
Visit
When my sister comes to visit I remind her I was born without a sister.
She talks about people we know but they all have some other name—
Wind Wheel Turning, Dark as Earth, Song on Infinite Loop
and as she speaks I recall unlived histories inside my body.
When my sister visits she’s packed into her suitcase
all the continents our family has made a home on.
She pulls them out one by one with the look of a collector on her eyes
each cumbersome body of land revealed as though a thrift store bargain
a discarded synagogue hat with a crumple in the brim.
She sits on the floor laying continents over her lap, stitching
and unstitching borders with embroidery thread
tracing trade routes with a thimble-clad thumb.
This kinship confounds me, tangles me in.
I am sistered, sister-lined.
Claimed by something, I am more and less form.
I am crowded in with a gratitude huddled in storm.
When my sister comes to visit she likes to smoke, much like my brother.
She rolls her own, dense with a flora still green and still growing
and the smoke fills the rooms of my house
and saplings crop up between bookshelves.
A swamp has begun to grow waxy grasses over the sink.
I keep trying to tell her I don’t have a sister
but she suggests that we arm wrestle and when I say
that’s not how I was raised she tilts her head to the side
and says nothing. Or she strokes my hair and says nothing.
Or she watches the mid-afternoon light creep across the room
whispering let it come down.
Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Rabbit Journal, and Plenitude Magazine. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal Joy Harjo Poetry Contest.
