Poetry: All forms & styles|Featured Series: Elegy|2020 theme: “Public Servant or Cultural Icon”||Kai Zweibel|"Is That Enough?"

Kai Zweibel

Is That Enough?

I wish I had
a legacy of poets
some unique
diction
or spelling,
some idiom
or usage
that, when written,
would tie me to all
the great
sufferers before me.

I wish I was influenced by
brilliant literature,
I wish I read Shakespeare, Dickinson
Nikki Giovani, Langston Hughes
as a child
let them mold my mind
charter my path
lead me
to where I am today.

What I have instead
Is Oy Veis Mir
when the breadcrumbs
littered the tiled floor.
I have Klutz and Kvetch
as we disturbed the prayers.
I have Lox and Bagels
from every Bris.

I have no techniques, no prose,
no settings, no foreshadow,
no mood,
no tone,
no assonance,
alliteration,
hyperbole.
All I have, is History.

About the writer:
Kai Zweibel is an emerging writer and a student at Florida International University. She has been published in various journals such as Not Very Quiet and Five on the Fifth. Kai spent her childhood between Toronto and Brooklyn and currently lives in Florida with her wonderful wife and daughter.

Image: The Other Shoes Dropping by Bruce Louis Dodson. Digital image. No technical information specified. By 2020. By permission. Bruce Louis Dodson is an American expat living in Borlänge, Sweden, where he practices photography and writes fiction and poetry. Some of his most recent work has appeared in Breadline Press West Coast Poetry Anthology, Foreign & Far Away – Writers Abroad Anthology, Sleeping Cat Books – Trip of a Lifetime Anthology, among others.