August 2024
Cantor Grinberg and
the pothead
by Eleanor Levine
My brother Harold walks around the house naked though I purchased a housecoat for him that he keeps under his bed.
He regularly eats my yogurt.
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I can’t determine if Harold needs money when the rent is due because he takes trips to Indonesia and has a large mortgage, though he is a resourceful sibling—he can make more money as a Lyft driver.
He’s also better than other landlords I’ve had. If the air conditioner breaks, he gets it fixed.
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Harold Robert Grossman is my brother. We grew up in the same house. I never liked the sound of his voice. I bribed him and my brother Eric to sleep at night rather than dispel theories about the universe. I paid them with the stuff you get in cereal boxes so I wouldn’t hear Harold’s voice. Eric’s voice was less annoying and could easily get lost in the white noise of Lite FM, which I played in those days because it was the closest thing in pop culture that could be attributed to poetry. Or at least a naïve view of poetry.
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Harold is upstairs sleeping.
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When not asleep he reads the NY Times or watches HBO on his iPhone 11. Tonight, he’s going to NYC to trade in his iPhone 11 for a 14. Other than that, he eats strawberries and cherry tomatoes.
Harold is diabetic.
He thinks I’m his secretary and has me answer the door while he’s in bed and sometimes wears his housecoat if I refuse to answer the door.
Harold asks me, after he declines to take the dogs out, “what happened with the AC guys?”
The AC people have come and gone. Harold has, in that time, viewed three HBO shows.
The workers gave me the paperwork and I offered them sodas.
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Harold calls me a “cunt.” I call him a “faggot.” He doesn’t apologize. Nor do I. Our relationship is like a two-lane highway with cars going in different directions.
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Harold needs his beauty sleep and won’t relinquish the time he flirts with various font styles on the NY Times website. He has a kindred relationship and deepened affection for op-ed pieces, especially those by guest columnists, and would rather send a favorite column via email, a piece regarding Nazi oppression of Jews in the Polish ghetto or something lighter like ghosts that appear in Michael Jackson’s studio (that’s the feature section, which he switches to when the Nazis are too furious for him), then answer questions for the AC workers. He forgets that I work from home.
In the 1970s, Harold was a hero to boys who were under the tutelage each evening of Cantor Grinberg, their bar mitzvah instructor. At 13 he and the other boys felt it was torturous to be in a room with a man who wore badly ironed shirts and reeked of matzah ball soup.
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Cantor Grinberg berates them.
He can’t reconcile his former Eastern European shtetl scholars with these Tiger Beat Magazine mongrels.
The boys, to deflect the cantor’s merciless and tiresome lessons, smoke pot, which makes the consumption of haftorah and Cantor Grinberg more palatable.
The cantor is wise to this.
After a while, he discerns the smell. Skunks.
“Are you smoking that illegal substance?” he asks Harold and
the others.
Harold does not tolerate a condescending cantor who does not believe in the sanctity of marijuana, which Harold considers the elixir of youth—an ambrosia that transforms his middle school hallway into a Pink Floyd album cover.
“Who eeeeeez smoking that ghetto sheet?” the cantor, in his Romanian accent, asks.
Sometimes Cantor Grinberg hits the boys with a ruler if they do not listen, but this trend becomes illegal in the 1970s.
The cantor relents.
Sarcasm is his only forte.
Cantor Grinberg is known as “the prima donna of the synagogue,” whereas the rabbi, who has a birthmark that looks like a piece of bubble gum permanently on his nose, is the cantor’s copilot on the pulpit—the diplomat who compensates for the cantor’s nasty remarks to his American congregants.
The “diplomat” lives in a more expensive house, which bothers Cantor Grinberg, who resides in a less exclusive neighborhood and has more bills than the rabbi.
The cantor does not believe girls should learn how to read from the Torah—he teaches me and my friends from a tape recorder, whereas my brother Harold and his pot-smoking male companions are taught to read Hebrew without vowels but don’t care either way.
“Are you the head street urchin?” the cantor points at my brother.
Harold says nothing.
“Are you him?” the cantor repeats.
Harold grins. He is like a kangaroo trapped in a corner and knows that it can pounce, but the cantor is more powerful than him so the kangaroo and/or my brother restrain themselves.
A week later Harold does not go to the bar mitzvah class with
his friends.
He smokes a roach in the bathroom.
The other kids wander in slowly, unenthusiastically, to “the cantor’s den,” which is what they call his classroom.
“Where is the drug dealer today?” the cantor asks.
The class gets silent.
Harold is now standing outside the classroom—by the window, in a concrete alley.
“No more drugs?” Grinberg asks.
There is a deadly calm. And then there is not a deadly calm.
An object flies through the window.
It’s a prophylactic Harold has stolen from my father’s top
dresser drawer.
The cantor is astounded.
He stares through the window.
Harold beams at him.
“You drug addict!” Grinberg bangs on the window.
Harold is outside laughing. The boys are in hysterics.
The cantor hits the pane until the window breaks. The entire window. Glass everywhere. There is now an open space between Harold and Cantor Grinberg.
“You will pay for this!” he roars at Harold like he is performing a blessing over the wine.
The boys are nearly peeing.
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It is 4:25 p.m. in our house. Harold has finally gotten out of bed.
The AC men have finished their work. I will be done with mine in an hour.
The kids Harold went to Hebrew School with are into pharmaceuticals. They have their own children who study for bar mitzvahs. He does not get invited to these bar mitzvahs, though one of the guys, a lawyer, helps him with a lawsuit.
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Harold does not smoke pot.
He takes the dogs outside and asks me for the receipt from the AC men who fixed our system today. He is happy there is no charge.
In several minutes Harold will leave in his electric car to do Lyft.
“Please take the garbage out…”
He ignores me.
“Will you please take the garbage out?”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you—you friend of the friendless!”
“Cunt!” he yells.
“Yeah, well, I’m not paying rent this month,” I alert him.
“Move out!” he replies.
“I can go on rent strike,” I advise him.
He says nothing.
I breathe deeply and utter a familiar phrase, “Say ‘you’re sorry!’”
“You say ‘you’re sorry!’”
“You’re not supposed to call me that!” I remind him.
“Ok,” he whispers, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I mutter.
Harold opens the door while the dogs whimper, and I say a little louder, “Love you...”
No response.
“Love you,” I whisper.
“Love you, too,” he says.
We nod and he shuts the door, but not as abrasively as the cantor.
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BIO
Eleanor Levine's writing has appeared in more than 120 publications, including New World Writing Quarterly, the Evergreen Review, The Hollins Critic, Gertrude, the Denver Quarterly, the Raleigh Review, the Notre Dame Review, Monkeybicycle, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature; forthcoming work in pacificREVIEW: A West Coast Arts Review Annual, Litro, and the Blue Lake Review. Her poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, Oregon). Her short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, was published by Guernica Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
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Three Poems
by Joshua Mckinney
Credential
I was born in Iowa, which is to say that I, too, attended
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I spent my formative years
sitting cross-legged and hunched amid straight rows of corn
that stretched to the level edge of the horizon.
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I was schooled in the stoic doctrine of a scarecrow
wearing my dead grandfather’s overalls, my dead aunt’s straw hat.
I grew silent reciting my primer to a one-eyed crow:
A is for Alfalfa; B is for Blizzard; C is for Corn.
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Unshod and shirtless, I was lashed by the summer sun’s ferule
until sheets of skin hung from my back like wallpaper
in a dead farmhouse. These my mother peeled away
and pressed in a Bible, and on these I composed my first poem,
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an ode to how no one wept when my father left
his tractor ticking in the field and walked off over the broken earth
into the arms of a waitress waiting with her herbs and erasures.
No one took offense at the insinuation of wild rose
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mounting the trellis by the well, or when the evening breeze
brought rumor of swine from the neighboring farm.
Although she strove to conceal it, I knew my mother
was a muskrat, for I had spied her rise sleek-furred and dripping
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​from the creek, crunching a crayfish in her teeth.
Oh, halcyon days of metamorphosis and theft! At times,
there were raccoons in the corn crib, hornets in the outhouse,
foxes in the henhouse. There were, at times, possums
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in the corn crib, skunks in the hothouse, raccoons in the outhouse,
foxes in the henhouse. Other times, there were mice
in the corn crib, hornets in the hothouse, foxes, raccoons,
and skunks in the henhouse. Once, I even caught my granny
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sucking eggs in the henhouse, but that became our bond
and no one was harmed. Come winter, the cold smacked me
around until my nose dripped to my lips and froze.
The sleeves of my jacket were snail-tracked with snot.
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My cheeks chapped as I tracked myself down the ice-
packed storm-cellar path for a jar of sunlight and syrup.
I gobbled apricot cobbler and green beans and dreamed of
a time when the glass world would shatter and I could
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launch a fleet of paper boats in the horse trough.
When spring set the trees and eaves to weeping, I made
mud pies and fed my slipper to a sow. And when at last
the grass erased it all with green, I escaped my personality,
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and my degree was conferred. All this was a long time ago,
I remember, as I stand on the beach and gaze across
a wind-harrowed sea to the convex western edge of the horizon.
But set down this, set down this: my tutelage cost nothing
save the smell of silage, the sight of my granny
come lumbering from the barn, a pail of moonlight
in each hand. My only assignment was to rise as nobody
from my cot on the screen-porch where I tossed
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in the fever of night’s damp dog-mouth, to rise and run
barefoot under a sky so sprent with stars they sank to earth,
where I plucked them from their erratic orbits and held them
in loose devotion, pulsing and luminescent, their greeny light
leaking through the fingers of my sticky, anonymous fists.
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American Idiom
​When I was a boy and playground squabbles grew
too heated, our last resort was to evoke
the power of our fathers and to boast,
“My dad can whip your dad.” If it wasn’t true,
it hardly mattered because somehow, we knew,
or couldn’t know, that men would never come to blows
over what we said behind the jungle gym. We spoke
freely, not knowing that our tongues could do
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​far more than fists. There was a brutal fluency
that we absorbed at home, immersed in words
condensed to violent metaphors; they colored
speech with the hue of our community.
In time we’d learn to wield a lexicon of slurs,
and thus, to love our kind, united in identity.
Unto This Day
After the thundersnow, when the cell-latch
lifted, I kissed the ones I loved and fled
into the crystal hills, where blue on white
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and white on blue, my liquid eyes breathed
arias of ice. I left a shallow track, and when
new snow began to fall, I looked back
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and saw each footprint was a prayer
that only memory’s tracing could keep clear.
Love’s frigid vigil held me there
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until all rote relinquishments were healed.
Lost and full of promise, I could not move
to mar my hope in what I had not seen.
Thence when I woke to waking, I was home,
hopeful and devoured. And no one knew me there.
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BIO
Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.