Miriam Akervall
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Yahrzeit
On shabbat, morfar would chase me
on all fours, kippa barely clipped
to the few strands on his head.
He’d say, should we put mustard on these?
Holding up my toes to his brick oven
mouth. Now, in the country where he once drove
mom through a redwood, I spend
my morning looking in through windshields.
Air fresheners shaped like sleeves
of french fries, a flag rolled neatly on the dash.
There are men leaning on pickups,
sunglasses nesting
on their ballcaps, and women
with hair the color of plums
walking their cigarettes like dogs. Cattails
are arching through the open grave
of a ditch on Asbury.
A single smoke stack in the empty lot
on Almon blinks its belly at the sun. Like a hollow
after the owl has flown.
Miriam is a translator and poet writing between English and Swedish. Their work appears or is forthcoming in the Colorado Review, The Fourth River Literary Journal, Volume Poetry and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from the Swedish Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center. They live in Moscow, Idaho.