Exodus Song, and Song in Tammuz Avia Tadmor (bio) Exodus Song When the drowning comes, know: there will still be horses, loose and alone in the old country—their eyes flipped upwards, the horseshoes snapping one after the other and shooting into the great black night like the prophet Muhammad's spears. When the drowning comes, know the farrier will re-build his shop, sell toys or trinkets on a distant avenue decked on both sides, he'd notice, with unfamiliar flags. But the horses— yes, they'll be running and running until they are no longer horses; the bare hooves will lift and lash like decades over his country of ghosts, his country of wet black ash. Remember it even here, underwater: the warm rush of blood, the old heart, its pulling and plunging the way a blind man's gullet pulses the psalms. Remember the boy watching his teacher on fire, how her body relights the city's forsaken square. He knows, the soldiers are sleeping at last in their various plots, a girl already in her new country reads Dostoevsky in English. Her hair smells of mothballs and basements, walls discolored with rain. She moves her pen in the margins and it's a tongue not quite yet her own. Had I been grateful here? Was I driven by purpose? And were these always my own thoughts regarding the afterlife? Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse flickering late in July. Did I make it a home? Did my brother feel pain? All my life I am trying, Lord, not to inscribe your full name. [End Page 120] Song in Tammuz after Traci Brimhall The last time I saw my brother, he'd been dead eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat, his arm hanging out the window and whistling an old boot camp song. He said we were born on the two ends of Tammuz and that our mother, ever since Dachau, knew God wanted us close. The road curved along the Hasbani River. He turned his head toward the apple groves, let the wind breathe on his beard as if it hadn't been washed and treated in Tahara. Cursed the plains, their magnificent light in the Arabic he'd learned in a village beyond the plateau. We stopped for gas and he took off his shirt. Shrapnel gleamed like mussel shells caught in the skin above his ribs. He said he'd travel again underground, spend nights counting beetles in trenches, that he'd tasted the blood of palm trees in yellow dates on the other side of the drought. Years ago, we saw a woman with wild hair pull bits of gold from her mouth and cast them like the Mayans cast them, into a sinkhole by the Dead Sea. Flies bustled in and out of her dress. The desert hummed underneath like an engine refusing to cool off. When the late sun vanished into Hebron, she chanted something in Russian, bent over to watch the last bit of gold overcome by a womb of earth. The rim collapsed under her weight and hours later they mined her: dogmatic, unwilling to show herself through the muck and salt. No one claimed her. A tourist, my brother said, and he held me so I could stand what the land, in its unquenchable thirst, had done. [End Page 121] Avia Tadmor Avia Tadmor was born in Israel. She received her BA from Harvard University and is currently completing her MFA in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, where she also teaches undergraduate writing. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Adroit Journal, Apogee, Fugue, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor is the recent recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. She was named a finalist for the 2016 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. Copyright © 2018 by Middlebury College Publications
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