Carly Sachs
Simchat Torah 2024
The orange sun rising behind the house,
light as loud as screams.
My daughter draws hearts all connected by lines.
When I ask her how she came up with that idea
she says I just did.
Next it’s triangles, all shapes and sizes,
connected by those same lines,
but this time it’s a spiky monster.
The fact is good and evil need
each other. Without them,
hope would be the stranger we never meet.
The orange cat who always finds his way
into our laps, his fur, the softest thing
life has made.
The waning gibbous moon
over the driveway,
quiet as a whisper
in the blue of morning.
Making Challah in a Hurricane
The dough is ready, but with no power,
it will keep rising, the way life keeps moving forward.
Yesterday my first colonoscopy, my daughter writing letters,
the fact that you cannot stop time.
Alone in this house, I picture everyone else riding out this storm,
candles flickering, loved ones huddled.
It’s almost romantic how disaster brings us closer.
I text my husband to come home for afternoon hurricane sex.
What else to do when everything has been shut off?
He texts back from the office: wish I didn’t have stuff here.
Outside our red maple, branches snapped,
The exposed bark the color of challah dough,
the fact that anything can be broken.
The fact that some things break gradually over time,
and others so suddenly.
I sit in my parked car with the engine on so I can charge my phone
before I pick my daughter up from school.
How we transfer power from one object to the next.
The fact is we can choose to come together or not.
How we try to be normal when nothing is normal.
When my husband comes home,
he says nothing to me.
Takes the saw to the tree.
Only Child
The child before my daughter,
the one I willed alive inside.
They could not find the heartbeat
at my first ultrasound, the first time
to hear the sounds of life and then nothing.
The technician called someone else in.
Maybe you are not as far along as we had thought, she said.
Her hand quietly squeezed mine before she called for the midwife.
I held on to hope, the resonance of women’s hands
still believing in life.
The blood came at the studio
where I taught moms and their babies yoga.
The bust of a pregnant belly and breasts.
Goddess I wanted to pull off the wall and break.
But to be a mother is to want to break,
and not.
When my daughter asks for a baby to play with,
I hold my breath and smile.
I do not tell her when she was in my belly,
I waited for her to disappear too.
I learned to not want for much or more.
The story comes easy explaining it to others,
why we don’t have another child.
Both my husband and I are onlys.
Instead I put her hand on my belly.
Carly Sachs is the author of the steam sequence (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2006) and Descendants of Eve (Blue Lyra Press, 2020). She is the editor of the why and later (Deep Cleveland Press, 2007), a collection of poems about rape and assault. Her poems and stories have been included in The Best American Poetry series and read on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Recent work has appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, the At the Well blog, and the Earth Etudes for Elul project. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.