© 2008-2009 Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Sharpfocus Media Services Website Design by Arnold Danielson
 | ||||
Click Here!
Naomi Chase
Click on the "Archive" button above to return to the Features archives
Naomi Chase’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, 5AM, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her latest poetry book is Anonymous Fox, Turning Point.. She is the author of three other poetry books, two chapbooks, one of which won a Flume Press Award, and many short stories which have been widely published and anthologized. Other books include A Child Is Being Beaten, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and The Underground Revolution: Hippies, Yippies & Others, Funk & Wagnalls. She reported for The Village Voice, and has been a Fellow at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Banff Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Arts, etc. Chase has taught poetry workshops at Harvard, Wesleyan,Regis, Wellfleet Library, The Salvation Army, and New York Public Schools, among others.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bris
From Anonymous Fox
The Bris
My daughter, a Madonna, waits,
Flowers in her hair.
Footmen bring her
The infant on a tray,
I’m the dead mother in “Our Town,”
Watching her life, unable
To stop
The little knife.
Anonymous Fox
I, too, am wild to hold
Since Nadia found the tattered fox
Near my house, in the bednest
Of its ratty fur.
Nadia can't thin lettuce without wincing,
Yet she’d make a paintbrush of its tail,
Bury the rest.
It's my fox, isn't it,
My bed salted with its matted hair,
My own, thin skin.
As for its fur, why not keep it,
A housewife's thrift,
Like Jews' hair stored
In an Argentine barn, for future use,
Like Spaniards smelting
Ataphaulpha's gold gods to cannon.
Isn't all death a good riddance,
Lewd providence,
Quitting earth of the useless,
The dirties,
While we expedient manufacturers
Go about our cleansing business.
Why the Messiah Is Not Perfect and Why She Can't Marry
Gittel knows that nothing can be perfect but God,
and if He is not perfect,
but a shunt eye,
an ear stuck with cotton,
a mouth with no tongue,
then all is flawed,
even the prayer shawl she stole from her father,
to camouflage a girl’s prayers,
a marred sky to marry under,
a stained bond with God
if she married.
Gittel can't do woman's work in a tallit.
Suppose the one blue thread that lets the spirit out
caught her husband’s beard, her baby’s mess,
or dipped in flour as she braided dough,
if she were married and a mother.
She must study Torah
and the smallest creatures,
the ant as it scurries back and forth
like some creator whose work is never done;
the gold bee who honeys the world
but stings, like the King of Kings, if bothered into fury;
the fly, its life briefer
than a god's breath takes to circle the world.
