Decades later, a childhood encounter may reveal its significance. However keenly observant you were at ten or twelve, how well could you interpret what you saw—or what you felt? In this poem, a young girl contends with “the forbidden” twice in one week, while the woman she has become revisits each scene. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
ANATOMY LESSON AT THE HEBREW DAY SCHOOL
Torah study ended early, and in the cafeteria
on a butcher-papered table, a classmate’s father, a doctor,
unfurled a purple-veined pig lung. The severed end
gaped like a small mouth. He slipped in a straw
and blew until it inflated long as the balloons
carnival clowns bent into beasts
to perch on our heads.
We’d been studying the first siblings:
Abel’s name means “vanity,” “a shallow breath,”
while Cain means “to possess.”
I chose
that same table for lunch, ate the cheese pizza
my mother packed to please the school
instead of the pepperoni I preferred
at home. Did anyone else see
the brown spots beneath my seat?
Pig blood in the kosher cafeteria.
I scuffed it with my toe.
The Saturday before, with no one watching
us, my sister of the needs so loud they drowned
out my own had slipped from her raft
to the bottom of the pool. I’d kicked my float directly
above, imagining—
blue quiet of water and sky, no eyes
but mine—
for a moment (I swear, just
one), before pulling her, gasping,
to the surface. A choice made
in the space of a shallow breath.
The rest of the school day, I whispered
as I walked: trayf/kosher, unfit/fit. A foot
in each world. Felt the long balloons
in my chest empty and fill, the strange animals
they became: lobster, camel, hare.
No one knew
the sins, future or past, I tracked
through those halls: the life I hoped to possess,
the choices I’d make. How much
of the journey would be arrival—and escape.
Jessica Jacobs, a 2025 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of three books of poetry, including unalone and Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, each named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year. She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.
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Opening image: Darreenvt (CC BY-SA 3.0)