Tag: Catherine Gonick

Two Poems by Catherine Gonick

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How I Became a Zionist Without Really Trying

Born on the wrong side of the Jewish blanket,
all I knew of Israel growing up was not the Exodus
but my crush, on fellow half-Jew Paul Newman
as he played a full one in the movie.

My uncles were anti-Zionist Communists,
my grandparents supporters of Birobidzhan,
the Soviet version of a Jewish homeland.
My father played violin at their parties.

I fell in love with a dual-national Jew from Detroit
and then with his nine-year-old Israeli son.
Terrorists attacked schools near the kid’s,
and he told me he felt like a target.

During the Gulf War, the kid put on a mask
and, surprise, my husband was called up,
ordered by the IDF to report to Fort Dix
with his reserve unit, all old men over 40.

Later the kid learned how to drive a tank,
got sent to Lebanon. In the West Bank, he checked
IDs, told me how easy it was to slip
on a mask of power in that thankless job.

My husband and I were on treadmills, watching tv,
when Rabin got shot. My beloved froze, almost fell.
Fast forward to October 7th. For failure to denounce
Israel’s response, I became a Zionist to anti-Zionist pals.

Now I felt like a target myself. Short on ideology,
I was long on lived experience. Love and history
met, as I double-checked the box for chance,
wept like a Jew by the rivers of New York.

*

Long Ago in the Bay Area

I never knew our gardener’s name
and he didn’t speak as he worked
miracles with the rosebushes.
Our last backyard had been ok,
but this one was heaven,
with a flagstone patio just outside
our backdoor, and two more levels,
up small flights of flagstone stairs.
Next came the garden, and on top,
a tall flagstone barbecue. We ate
our charcoal burgers at a redwood
table, sat on redwood benches, drank
red wine from Napa. Two first-generation
Americans, a Pole and a Jew,
my parents, had made it in California.

Our gardener came once a week.
I didn’t know where he lived, or
that, before I was born, he’d been forced
to live in hell. It wasn’t until college
in Berkeley that I happened upon the truth.
Sorting through boxes of paper files
and photos, randomly stored on a shelf
in the library where I worked, I understood—
there had been an internment—
and why, when the cute Japanese
guy from Oakland who was dating
my Jewish roommate from L.A.,
mentioned he’d been born in Alabama,
and I’d asked in surprise, How did that
happen?—he didn’t answer.

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including ONE ART, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in the spring. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company to slow the rate of global warming.

Three Poems by Catherine Gonick

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Why I Couldn’t Believe in Revolution

The young just want a revolution, total change,
a young man’s mother explained. When I was young
I couldn’t answer Revolution’s call, but didn’t know
why until I first heard Bernie, his Brooklyn accent
so familiar from my college days in Berkeley.
It was the accent of young men who gathered
in the sun daily on the terrace of the Student Union
to drink coffee and who never stopped talking
about the coming Revolution, in that accent.

As a Californian I had no accent, only the same
Russian Jewish revolutionary grandparents
as those men. I had no idea what they even meant
by Revolution, only that it involved a lot of meetings,
at which silent women made and served the coffee
and did a lot of cranking of the mimeograph machine.
Out on the terrace where the men talked, I sat alone
and read not Che but Roethke. Like the rotund poet,
I liked to take my waking slow, but overhearing
those men I couldn’t help thinking of The Terror,
of what happened to Marie Antoinette and my relatives
who had listened to Stalin way too long.

I waited to hear What Came After the Revolution’s
joyful, violent climax, which in a play or bed,
must be followed by dénouement, and perhaps ennui.
I was already there, sad and bored since that time
my father, a longtime ACLU supporter, remarked
that, alas, female citizens were still second-class,
in a tone that showed he wouldn’t fight for me.
Decades later, I had nothing against Bernie,
even liked him and what he had to say.
I just couldn’t take his voice, the same way
some people hated Kamala’s laugh, and others
believed whatever Trump promised.

*

Into the Woods

Once when a friend and I were out in the woods,
stoned on LSD, we saw a man looking at us
as he played with himself, and discussed
how we should react. I’m trying not to laugh,
I whispered. My friend asked whether
we should say something to him.

I wasn’t afraid, because the man
was on the other side of a wide creek
and my friend was also a man.
A woman and a man, really high,
we looked at the other man showing us
his goods and could not think what to do.

In patriarchy, it’s said, what a woman
fears most from a man is being hurt,
while what he most fears from her
is being laughed at. It’s said that a man
is either a woman’s rapist or her defender.
These two men were neither.

My friend and I couldn’t stop looking
at that bird-in-the-hand, as it asked
to be appreciated, and seemed delighted
to be noticed, from a safe distance.
Freud said civilization began with upright
posture, which made genitals visible.

*

Merging

Now you have lost the sight of one eye
as well as the hearing stolen

long ago from one ear
on the opposite side

Your losses are symmetrical

and I can’t stop imagining your head
full of holes

Sometimes I feel that I am you

the way I did that day we met
by surprise in a clothing store

and in that first moment thought
you were me and I you

Now I am a waterfall that can’t stop
falling and I feel you falling too

I remember how as children
we sometimes dreamed the same dreams

wondered in the morning if they began
with me or you

You hadn’t wanted to see me
for a long time

but emailed to let me know
because, you said, You’re my sister

I cover one eye with one hand
use the other to stop hearing in one ear

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in a wide range of journals, including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She has a book forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in the spring, and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company attempting to slow the rate of global warming.