FOMITE

“They are filled, the tombs” Michal Rubin writes, as she chronicles her grief and rage during the first year of the current Gaza war. These poems are a eulogy for a dismantled fantasy, a foundation Rubin grew up with in Israel.  She exposes her helplessness with an intense directness that challenges her own privileged safety, while carrying on a tender poetic dialogue with Palestinian writings.

 

The poems move between days of despair and days of yearning for another world. There are hard pictures of battlefields: “the beetle’s legs were gripping/ the wrinkled uniform of the dead”, and the dream-like descriptions of another world where connection and understanding is possible “...we touched with our fingers the grooves on our foreheads, measured the depth of the story that created the craters on our faces/ We mapped each other’s tales on our bodies…”.

 

About the Author

Michal Rubin was born and raised in Israel and has been living in Columbia, SC for the past 33 years, working as a psychotherapist and a cantor. The impetus for her writing is the unending and progressively worsening Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her poetry wrestles with a mingling attachment to Israel, her birth place, her pain and rage over the years of Israeli oppression of Palestinians, the occupation, and the war in Gaza. She lives with the complexity of having grandparents who were murdered in the Holocaust, and being a member of a  “tribe” that practices apartheid. 

 

Her poetry has been published in Wrath Bearing Tree Journal, Rise Up Journal, Topical Poetry, Fall-Lines, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Waxing & Waning: A Literary Journal,  Palestine-Israel Journal, The New Verse News, Writers Resist, Dissident Voice, Writers Launch, and Critical Muslims. Her chapbook, Home Visit, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press in 2024. Her full manuscript,  And the Bones Stay Dry is forthcoming in early 2025.