held Things
Linoleum toes spin Saturday poison while browning corners in a rosemary desert Stretch midnight Strain morning I say (with insecticide teeth) flashing fluorescent lashes Before disappearing into the fingernail moon.
from under Kiddush tables
Facing east. The shofar calls out to me, alone. My lips are moving to Daven but the prayer is not real. Cut as it was from living flesh, from bone, from skull. Mortal sin, abominations I cannot spell. War cries bellow from the ram, held down. Arrive at the wall, wail wax poetic. Weep for the loss of poets, weep for the loss of the weeping, weep for the loss of the ram.
Shoshana Surek is a first-generation American and daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She received her MA and MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University. Her essays, short stories, flash fiction, and poetry, can be read or are forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Carve Magazine, december Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Malahat Review, Vestal Review, Burningword Literary Review, Cease, Cows, 3Elements Review, f(r)iction Magazine, and others. In 2017 and 2020, She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is a 2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award finalist. More of her work can be found at ShoshanaSurek.com