Two Poems: “Ode to Laryngitis” and “Upon the Head of a Goat”
Ode to Laryngitis
A friend laments you’re stalking her,
skulking at every sniffle. She has a voice coach.
Says it’s a thing one needs at our age.
Apparently, they are many things one
needs at our age. I have none of them.
In my twenties you’d visit
after I yelled at rallies. I’d claw
your face, wedded as I was to notions as
ridiculous as expressing oneself
and being heard.
In my thirties I met someone who went on silent retreats.
It’s amazing, he said, when you return.
How unnecessary everything everyone says!
Huh I said and walked away.
I could have used you then.
I have told these stories too often,
with too much irony or glee.
Please stop me next time.
Tell me: what could be better
than being voiceless?
To hear café chatter & think,
nothing, nothing at all in reply.
The Quakers say when you pray,
be silent unless the spirit moves you.
Even then, be weary.
It may not be the spirit.
When we say “there are no words,”
we mean we said them & they did no good.
We mean there are words we have no right to say.
Upon the Head of a Goat
Two days before the storm, I walk Church Avenue’s snowless sidewalks & find myself behind a metal shopping cart filled with slaughtered goats. Their flesh pulses in the cold sun, their dead frisbee-sized eyes glance this way & that. Outside the bodega was that comfortable city talk: when would roads be salted, would the poor kids get their snow day. A scene to soak up with delight, until the poor man pushing the goat cart stumbles, wheels caught on uneven cement squares. He scrambles & I imagine how he could be any of us: worried about the state of our wares en route to market, be they goat, pot, or poem.
It doesn’t seem carts can tip until they do. It took five men with bloody gloves to wrestle the poor creatures back to their metal cage. Nothing without a face! the vegetarians say, but these were no faces staring back, they were heads.
Even when not chosen for the sacrifice, goats get a bad reputation. They’ll eat your shirt, kick you in the shins. They’re no one’s symbol of freedom, no one’s sacred cow. But as someone across the street pointed at the massacre site and laughed, I could have sworn I saw the last one captured take a single, ocean-deep breath, ready to regain his skin, shake his head like it was adorned with the heaven’s own crown, and bolt to the F train like a prize stallion.
Laura Tanenbaum is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she also serves as the chapter chair of the faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress. She has published poems, short fiction and essays in publications including Rattle, Aji, Cleaver Magazine, On the Seawall, Cider Press Review, and many others. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent and many other publications, and she also written about teaching for Hybrid Pedagogy and Teachers College Record.
She is an active member of Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive synagogue in Brooklyn, and a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace, communities which have inspired her interest in building Judaism beyond Zionism, faith beyond tribalism, and Palestine solidarity across people of all and no faiths.