it’s 1906 / my great grandfather Sam lays tefillin / for the last time then leaves / them on the bedside table, / a loosening; the leather straps / left to dangle
The featured image was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.
Sarah Kaplan Gould is a Denver-born poet, ritual enthusiast, and educator living on occupied Cheyenne and Arapaho land. They are a member of the 2022-23 Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop Poetry Collective, and a graduate of LIU Brooklyn’s MFA program, where they focused on poetry and hybrid creative non-fiction. In addition to writing, they have spent much of the last several years teaching high school social studies, farming, and singing in community.
“We keep beginning again and again because we understand that this work is not a luxury; it is readying the soil for what our community intuitively knows can grow here.”