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Jews in Space

You can’t get a kosher butcher
up here to save your life.
We put on prayer shawls, tenting
ourselves in personal holiness,

but they fill and flutter
in weightlessness and Moishe
and Chaim get into fistfights
over what constitutes East
as we circle the earth. If

a day lasts only an hour,
the Sabbath queen must visit
three times daily—how can we
know when any day is over,

for that is always,
and never. Look toward earth
and your day will never end.
Out another porthole
God’s enduring emptiness is always

a night sky filled with moving stars.

--First appeared in Fourth River

Poet

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Plum Cantata
Jews in Space
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Known by Heart Poetry Preformance