Grace Who Moves Over the Face of the Water

Carl Sagan once said: pray your shell isn’t ordinary. 
Sure, there’s more to this story about why generations 

of fishermen threw crabs bearing a samurai 
grimace back into the sea, & those hands taking

over natural selection, & no one ever asking 
what the crabs thought of our ideas of honor 

& memory — especially now, since rare are any
left with a faceless carapace, perplexing our ideas 

of what is legend & what is delicacy. & no one
remembers if it were Heike or Snow or Alaskan King 

that was served the night, Terrance, you showed up last 
Canadian Thanksgiving with that pie & a piece clearly

missing. That — as I imagine it — classic & mildly sweet,
nominally-offending kind — the most real fruit feeling 

that could, if we let it, sweeten the loneliness of social 
distancing or sweep the family puzzle like it’s the world 

series — oh yes, how wholesome, with ordinary 
lattice & baked carapace — & sure, there’s still

more to these pre-Covid legends: that friend 
picking you up after a fourteen-hour flight 

from Hong Kong — a friend who said, in all 
candor, “I should feed you —” & then gifted 

you a bottle of wine
& this incomplete pie, 

which you declared
as “secondary

sweets,” & which your family spotted
right away. I mean, its incompleteness. 

I mean, if moxie were a crab striding
through the shallowest of streams,

no fishermen would dream of determining the fate
of your family, & I have no idea what finally awaited

that pie which, in my mind, is inasmuch oblivion 
as its missing piece 

because there is always
so much more to a story, say, 

why I’m still wearing lipstick
when my own true armor 

is hidden. Say, when I go anywhere,
a piece goes missing before 

I’ve walked out the front
door, in socks too thin, a whisper 

of frail lace, facing a night of mud & ice
— & still, I go, I go like this May isn’t 

winter & wind-torn & knowing one day 
I’ll have to relearn how to be 

with the faces of people in my city.
I’m already looking into it. I can’t explain

my grounds for this kind of daring. Perhaps a childhood wary 
of tenderness, perhaps a longtime feeling of undeserving 

until too many pieces went missing & woke us
all up on the shore creeping upon our carapace.

I’m not intentionally being 
glib. I’m trying to have moxie

by asking what happens to all the missing pieces
of pies, puzzles, the Potato Heads, Yahtzee.

What happens when we lose 
the fake bones in Operation &

don’t feel it when someone touches the side
trying to save our Wish Bone, our Broken 

Heart, our Brain Freeze, & we wonder 
if these things ever existed in the first place,

when deep inside, our wiring is going haywire
while seeming just fine & complete to the naked 

eye. We don’t know how to say to family that one 
day we’re just walking & our balance goes missing 

& our neurologist cannot say when it will strike again 
but tries to understand this translation: that wholeness 

might be an imaginary feeling, 
but it’s just as well a kind of honor 

drifting away further 
from memory,

long before such long days
of sirens & six feet & longing? 

Let’s not end there, 
in such murky waters.

Today, in Toronto, they say it will snow all night. 
They say lots of pies will be eaten,

before cooled from the oven or taken straight 
out of a No Frills box, nary

a single slice
left without a fight.

Sometimes I wonder when I first came 
to your family, if I were, in the very beginning, 

lost from a cracked kitchen counter
where no one had time to sit for dinner.

I wonder if you know what it means when I said to all of you,
that in my family, we’d eat the pie, no matter how many slices 

went missing. I wonder if you know, now that I’m not with you,
& my missing piece calls faintly, numbly, to lost better days,

I don’t fear the fishermen.

ξ

Poet Wrestling with the Passage She’s Never Made 

We never liked their bullish bulk, their twisted 
intent in which one actually spends money 

like water. No, we knew what we’d lose in the casinos

turned disco night, stripped 
for tomorrow’s buffet. 

The sneers & rage we’d share on the sheer 
markup of lobster, considering the place.

& how angry we’d get at the vastness of ocean kept 
away as if we were drones hovering over a beached 

baleen carcass. A sad kind of robotic father-daughter 
dance of grandeur & tragedy without being a part of it.

No, we wouldn’t like it one bit, what
nights & days lost in squinted steelpit —

& Aba, 
I love you, 

but I do regret all the wasteful 
journeys we did not take.

I miss the glimpse of greatness breaching
  a little too closely, reminding us how out of place 

we’ve been at these wakes: 
  two Jews who don’t believe

the departed now live
  in a better place. How to stand 

strange 
  again, 

sweating awe & angst, & a bit 
  of relief, guilty of a faith

dubious of our place 
  as the answer to why 

we will not cling 
  to the side of a ship, 

shy of waves & shadows,
  among the light & the plenty.

  You say love is not an objective. 
& I say maybe faith is all the fake 

discos filled with the deep, deep
breaths of some twisted purpose

so that our last stop might be a battered
  port where strangers end up together,

briefly. A daytime excursion 
  at best, a dalliance with plastic

forked tails bought last
  minute. How careless,

that final horn sounding.
  We wouldn’t hear it. We’d

jump, wanting some scope, 
  some range, of a thing

who doesn’t know its size
  is its own salvation.

ξ

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She recently edited a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades and is finishing a series called “The Atomic Sonnets,” in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at www.7TrainLove.org.