My grandfather snapped
fish spines off the coast of
Tel Aviv. Slick carcasses
slipping through his coltish
grip as though they were still alive
and thrumming, kicking in the Adriatic.
Latent instincts for survival sparking through
the only dormant muscles in the desert.
Stripped to his tawny chest he would wade
knee-deep in the algae & water pooling
under the orange groves, catch the rainfall
of citrus in skyward arms.
His soles thickened to leather from
skittering across the baking streets,
parched & shriveled like denied lips.
In the gravel he gathered you,
palms coarse, desiccated, groping
for your final strains. You escape
in relieved exhalations, lifting from
the earth at intervals wider than
floodgates.
Saba tugged Shoshana’s umber
plait, twined it around his enchanter’s
finger. They were twelve when they met—
she, staggering in from Jerusalem, caked
in Masada’s dust. Eighteen when they
holstered guns & swallowed smoke.
I do not know this place, embedded
as it is with the bodies of my ancestors
& their enemies, dyed in blood hot,
livid from the midst of battle. I scrawled
my prayers once on notepad paper
& twisted it within the crevices of the
Wailing Wall but can’t remember its contents
or whether it rests there still, atrophying.
I do not know this place, though I
am derived from its crumbling dirt
as my classmates do not know my
name was snatched from a city
on the West Bank, not from Plath poems
& air spirits, though sometimes I wish
that were the case.
I will not tell them.
Mother caresses my chin to tell me
I am my name—Ariel, the Lion.
Yet my grandparents’ steps
still thump in my ears, the bombs
will always shudder and rattle
my white-washed bones. I dart
back into my burrow, and I know
their smoke lingers.
Ariella Carmell is a senior at Marlborough School in California, where she is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine and Head Copy Editor of the newspaper. A Foyle Commended Poet of the Year and a recipient of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, she has work published or forthcoming in Cadaverine, Crack the Spine, Vademecum, Crashtest, Eunoia Review, and Canvas Literary Journal, among others. She also blogs for The Adroit Journal about the intersection of film and literature. Come next fall, she will attend the University of Chicago.
