Taipei, July 2022–Georgia, 2024

HANA BREDSTEIN

When my father came home
From chopping down trees,
Smelling of welded metal 

Of sweat on 
My feet, melting legs
Into rubber soles,

Tree sap seeped into work shirt,
He told my brothers go for the nose
If they bleed 

They will leave you alone. 
(Of every weakness 
I hate weakness most.)

At bedtime he would 
Read Torah stories 
From a book called

“And Tell Your Son ...”
(Why not your daughter?)
After I was born, 

His coworkers said
Don’t worry, 
The next one 

Will be a boy. 
The fortuneteller
Says I’m a man 

In a woman’s body. 
Does she know 
How I took shrooms

And felt my womb
Like a pomegranate 
With only three seeds?

(Now I am hidden
In mountains, shapeless
Unseen, hewn from dirt.

I traced his steps 
Across the universe,
And fell short.)

Does she know
How to pound each step into the 
Earth and feel it push back? 

(My mother says: 
“Two more toothbrushes
Until you come home.”

My father writes:
“Don’t let your children 
Worry. They’ll pick up the language

Regardless. As long as they know
If anyone so much as lifts a hand
At them, a brother, father, grandpa 

Will punish the offender.” 
I remember 
My first word in English:

Cucumber. My first word in
Russian: A fight
Or struggle.) 

Does she know?
To receive communion
In the creek is to be a mirror, 

A copy, to sneak
Through the footprints,
Never as good, 

And yet, it is to inherit, 
Carve into oneself,
Bleeding and delicate.

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HANA BREDSTEIN received a BA in international relations from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and now lives and works in Boston. Her work has been featured at the Mr. Hip Presents Reading Series in Boston.