Strip my blue house down

You forget that I’m the sunset master,
he says, as earth tilts to please clouds 
on their conveyor belt, swiftly, excuse 
my vertigo as you rush to settle, sky. 
The left side burning, the other wandering 
towards mountains. This sky will be only grays, 
not red like you claim, or burn my golden 
balcony down to its broad spokes. Across 
the city, stores barred, roads bared to cement 
seams, are we all longing to be naked 
tonight? Lampposts bend at the waist to shadow 
bodies, birds nestle in cool air, drums some-
where. Here, looking, we pattern our steps 
and story our way past this night.

Seasons

Bear summer. Bear sheets of meadow rising
like dawn. Bear rain under cover. Bear story
when it is long or heavy as if wet. Bear clay 
and bake it outside. Bear fire far away, ash
at home, in their backyard where they buried
their baby in brief light. Bear a hard
floor, a loud talker, a week of heat. Bear tradition
over the table like cloth. Bear witness, bear a likeness
to first witness, to grandmother’s waist
then curve. Bear a peach, an apple
from its tree, a braid from its womb.
Bear in mind, bear 
in soul, bear a hand to help 
across the river. Bear its cold
as you pause to look. Bear sure-footed
decay on the phone, as his eyes droop 
then shine amidst sickness. Bear candles
in the sink, bear your breasts to winter 
long-coming. Bear silence as memory, loss choired 
to fullness. Laid bare to the skies, my body
eats down thunder. Bare bread and butter
on its side rolls off the counter. Bared
illness, defeat, barely fighting.
Barely slow, her hands reach towards me
for embrace. Bared to each other, we sit
in the news of time, like children, like birds.
Bared wind collapses, then soothes our fall.

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish History at UCLA. Her work explores diasporic memory and religious ritual, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-community networks of female religious transmission in colonial New Spain. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the history of the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet's own family histories. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, About Place (Black Earth Institute), and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and Colonial Latin America Review. She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence.

Published October 15 2024