Poem: Of Passover, Lesbian, Intolerance, History, Culture, Passion and Survival

after Reading that Orthodox Rabbis have Petitioned to Exclude any Mention of Gay and Lesbian Victims from a Holocaust Museum

This is what has happened and what has never happened.

I've heard it said there is a moment

-There! No there! Don't close your eyes

or you'll miss it!--

in which the flesh of two become one flesh

a moment in which the body forgets itself,

joined and joining can no longer remember

which of the arms and legs it came in with.

This has never happened.

What has happened: When two stay two

and are the same or different.

We are wet with the scent of salt,

I am salt and you are salt

and we hold each other together with wet palms

the way sand sculptures are held together;

you hold me, keep my shape,

keep me from spilling out into you

molecules akimbo.

I taste a bitterness on your skin

that is sweet to us.

I remember Passover I spent with a friend

who was learning his Jewishness from a book,

whose parents had forgotten

their name, their grandparents religion

the way they say the body forgets,

the way it doesn't forget.

There was something bitter to eat.

This is to remember.

This is to remember what others suffered to come here,

to survive, to make a place for us to survive in.

When you think of us do you remember

the bitterness? How sweet it is to us.

Your skin feeds me the memory of starving centuries.

Your fingers are the promise.

Your navel is a cup the angel drinks from.

Never forget.