Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

All of Me

Blood moving forwards,
body working back.
A change in time
and family tree.

Sick for months,
too busy scaffolding seclusion,

a home for a notion that
after all of it:

the moaning & cattle prod fire,
pleading & breath,
is so wholly mine–

this ghost.

 

Rabid

For a year after conception,
I searched for anyone with answers.
I traveled daily
with desperate questions
and held on tight.
Who are you?,
I needed to know.
Who would you have been?
I set my jaw to that one.
Do you exist?
and when can I stop crying for you in secret,
no longer on my mother’s lap?
Your absence is inconspicuous,
your absence is ghostly,
your absence is
your absence is…

But,
with only savage and desperate words for grief at my disposal, I kept quiet.

 

The lost baby poem, after Lucille Clifton

You would have been born into spring,
the year of a scalding season.
Instead,
deep into a November night,
our blood dissolved together
with the still water of the toilet bowl below.

On taking my first breath without you,
I wondered what I knew of the difference between
your blood and mine.
Even now I bleed from just my finger
and think of you.
Where are you?

All this ache and yet,
what I now lack
is so cruelly invisible.

 

Cleo Kidd is a poet in Hyde Park. Previously published by Greying Ghost Press and soon to be by Grub Street, she writes about our relationships with our environment and the harshness of nature. All Cleo’s work expresses much of the same sentiment: wanting nothing but to be turned loose, needing nothing but to be brought closer.”

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.