We are wearing history heavy like a raincoat
by Caleb Horowitz
We are wearing history heavy like a raincoat
soaked through cold.
History slouches out of Europe
like a fever into Queens
into my father’s soda shop
where he is stocking the shelves with Cel-Ray
marveling at the price of water
cased in glass, a stupid luxury,
and history has seeped into Chicago
where my sister suspends herself
gripping silk in the dark, just a few more years
like a bird who will soon retire from flight
and in the capitol, my brother takes the subway and whispers
a prayer for our dead dog,
and always my grandparents
are slipping into the thick stream of history,
my father is playing mahjong with grandma—
not my grandma but his,
and my sister is curled up with grandma in her deathbed,
both of them so little, not his grandma but hers,
and the youngest of us is frothing lattes in the sandwich shop
for people who are needlessly cruel.
I am afraid of my country
and of time passing liquidly through us,
and once again I am in middle school
drinking coffee with my mother at the kitchen table,
then the table is in my father’s office,
then my condo.
When my sister picks a wedding dress,
she waits hours to cry:
the tears are about many things at once,
the death of our dog, her cat’s fleas,
her fear of bed bugs, her inability to find a rabbi in time
for her fiancée’s dying grandfather,
who was not Jewish but wanted to cover his bases,
the fact that she will never own a house.
And some days the earth is walking so fast through time
that all of us are taking boats out of Europe
anchoring in Howard Beach where we will stand
in the soda shop fridge
baffled by the price of water in a bottle, glass
and then plastic, then glass again.
Caleb Horowitz is a North Carolinian poet, teacher, and penguin enthusiast. When he is not chaperoning dozens of students across the country for high school speech and debate tournaments, you can find him reading or writing poems about whales. You can find more of Horowitz's writing with Jewish Book Council, Gashmius, Psaltery & Lyre, Tiger Leaping Review, and Calul Journal.
