mourner’s kaddish for malcolm james mccormick by Adrienne Novy
Associate editor Hannah Cajandig-Taylor on today’s bonus poem: There's such an eloquent electricity in this beautiful, unexpected poem, in which Novy sings of bittersweet bereavement and prayer while meditating on ancestral tradition, begging us to contemplate life, death, and how we carry one another through memory. What a necessary, tender narrative. This is a poem I will keep coming back to.
mourner’s kaddish for malcolm james mccormick
& what is it, if not the most jewish thing
to say it could always be worse: the body, a plague:
locusts or a crowded wooden house. who knows
where the hell else we’d be going unless
we called it tradition. i mumble a song
that is both of the dead & the living. the record
under the needle is as round as a prayer circle,
an aubade wrapped in aluminum & gold,
a memory & a blessing against the bimah’s cheeks.
we take turns shoveling a new home for flowers.
when morning turns its back to the blue edge
of the world, i will be somebody’s ancestor.
Adrienne Novy is a Jewish and disabled artist, and graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program. She is the author of Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press 2018) and the mini-chapbooks, We Have Each Other’s Flowers (Zines + Things 2020) and Pull (Ginger Bug Press 2020). Adrienne has had poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Bettering American Poetry, Best of the Net, and her most recent work can be found in You Flower/You Feast: An Anthology of Prose, Poems, & Plays inspired by Harry Styles, and forthcoming in FlyPaper Magazine and HAD: Hobart After Dark. She lives in the Upper Midwest and has a cat named Laurie.
