by Edward Michael Supranowicz
Crop Circles
I am living. I remember you. — Marie Howe
What did the Kabbalists know that I don’t know?
Is there anything behind the number seven,
or does the voice of hashem really drive a person
insane? What do the voices of the dead jews
whose blood covered the walls of the gas chambers
and soaked into the pits of eastern europe
and contained the same dna as mine sound like
now, shrieking in their eternal agony if they are reunited
with the invisible energy, the am what I am,
the name of the name, the top of the pyramid?
I was repeating songs in my head because my heart
was broken by a loss I can never regain,
mistakes made by my own selfish and ignorant hand,
singing “crop circles in the carpet”
over and over again, and yet across time and space
my own family disappears again and again into dust and dirt-
i ask myself: WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY DO
there is hardly an answer worth typing out
I spend another short car ride swallowing my tears
afraid to skip to another song lest the emotions
I finally recovered depart once more and leave me numb
to the ending of the world and the slow cold rot
of social media and googling the phrase, “how to
not be scared,” but isn’t that something you learn through
faith in god and repetitive beatings?
So let me confront the talmud on a friday night
with the feel of a yarmulke still weighing on my head:
what do you know that I don’t know?
And the answer is in a million riddles
or a handful of cryptic stories: and aaron did the thing
with the other thing and then the guy had a whore and she
begat a child with the other guy and a sheep or a bush
something was on a fire and a lamb and a poet made a sandwich
and it all boiled down to crop circles in the carpet, all the loss,
all the people who aren’t here anymore,
and the somehow becoming okay with it.
Phillip Scott Mandel is the founder of Abandon Journal and has an MFA from Texas State University. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, Hobart, Bull, and many other journals. Originally from New York, he now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter. He can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet who has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.