Gilad Jaffe
MICHELANGELO’S MOSES
Take an invisible thing & build a house around it:
Cut a window in the wall & call it a door:
My house is a decayed house: & the Jew squats
on the windowsill: Merging with the weather:
Not even he can capture: Wind in material:
As words cannot come to us from dead languages:
Given there is no such thing as dead language:
& the wind is born into material already:
At the base of the mountain: Your eyes become toys
for other eyes: Gathered on the lonely piazza:
Delivered into our head: The distorted gift of horns:
But even more resonant: He has hidden our ears
GILAD JAFFE has poems in Conjunctions, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives and teaches in Iowa City.
ISSUE TWELVE features poetry by Samuel Amadon, Rennie Ament, Bruce Beasley, Brittany Cavallaro, Lidija Dimkovska, Denise Duhamel, Alexandria Hall, Rebecca Hazelton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kim Hyesoon, Gilad Jaffe, Michael Klein, Peter LaBerge, Nick Lantz, Eugenia Leigh, Robert Wood Lynn, Lisa Olstein, Eric Pankey, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Scanlon, Nathan Spoon, Sampson Starkweather, Peter Streckfus, Rodrigo Toscano, Stella Wong, and Felicia Zamora; fiction by Marie-Helene Bertino, Emily Neuberger, and Ed Taylor; nonfiction by Kate Colby, Krystal Languell, Kathryn Nuernberger, and J. M. Tyree; a film essay by Zack Finch; and Prageeta Sharma in conversation with Michael Dumanis.