Rachel Zucker

Rachel Zucker was born in 1971 in New York City. She studied psychology at Yale University and received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since then, she has worked as a photographer, a gem dealer, a certified labor doula, and an Adjunct Professor at Yale and NYU. Zucker is the author of Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan, 2003), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan, 2004), and the forthcoming collection The Bad Wife Handbook. Winner of the Strousse Award, the Barrow Street Prize, and the Center for Book Arts Award, she has published poems in such journals as American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Fence, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, and had her work included in The Best American Poetry 2001. Currently, Zucker is coediting, with poet Arielle Greenberg, an anthology of essays by women poets on mentorship, while also working on a novel and a book of nonfiction. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Diary (Underworld)

Only a mother could manufacture such a story:

the earth opened and pulled her down.

She shows my picture all over town

and worries the details of my molestation.

Terrified she screamed for mother…

but I did not scream.

She says it is like having an arm ripped

from her body. But think, Mother,

what it is to be an arm ripped from a body.

Bloody shoulder bulb, fingers twitching, useless.

Did she expect me to starve?

To wither away, mourning the tulip, primrose, crocus?

And if I have changed, so be it.

He did not choose me for my slim ankles or silken tresses.

She moans and tears her hair    Unfair!

There was so much I longed to teach her.

Sad Mother, who thinks she knows so much—

teach the farmer to grow seed.

The fields await instruction.

Not Knowing Nijinsky or Diaghilev

A certain kind of man asks the same question

again, again until it isn’t a question but

a threat, shove, spit in the eye.

Phyllis says you’re sitting on your power but

I know what I’m sitting on: my ass. Obviously,

running out of language.

My desire is “A pre-electric impulse with a too-small synapse.”

What a tired image that is. I sit on my power.

Finally, in the boxed-up city, night comes on

without a sunset; books push out their backs,

turn stiff arms away, press closer together.

The editor says we have no patience for metaphor.

In the dream the baby carrier is crammed with plastic bags.

My ex-lover shoots hockey pucks at my breasts through a metal tube.

I want to hold you once before the world explodes I say to the baby

who is not there. Two women screaming “Filthy Jews!” die too.

The memo from the editor: it is even sub-Hollywood.

I sit on my power and try to describe anything.

“My mother inside me”: air in a well; a heavy, starless chill.

Her love the texture of canned lotus root, the color

a cross-section of diseased lung; slight smell of vinegar.

The editor jots: no patience for description.

So I am back where I started; another old man and his helpful invective.

He suspects me. Uses the words “musicality,” “mimesis”;

what do you know, if anything?

I think: I know what it is to have a child…but (truth is) not now, I only know

what it is like.

Here:     here is a picture of me in labor:

…hand around the metal bar the body

crushing in and in the room white-hot,

exploding

The reason I even mention      [it]      is that I don’t know anything

but memory which is nothing except—child, sleeping in my elbow—

marks and tracings, a neural map, my thoughts are like piranha,

transparent and vicious, but no one gets away with similes like that.

Where is the pool of diction the myth described? The old man

spits in my eye, says a child is no excuse and points, pushing me

toward the shallow pond.

In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger

In your version of heaven I am blond, thinner,

but not so witty. In the movie version of your version

of heaven you fight God to come back to me.

It is a box office hit because you are an unbelievable character.

Nothing is real except the well-timed traffic accident

which costs 226 thousand dollars.

In real life, I am on a small bridge over a small creek.

Then it isn’t a bridge but a stadium. Then a low table.

A sense of knowing the future.

There is no clear location of fear.

I want you to say you will abandon your dissertation.

I want you to ask the man in the green scrubs if I was pregnant.

Put on the preservers! they announce. They are under your seats!

Time to tell your wife a few last things. People are puking

in the rows around us. The jackets sweaty and too big.

We are, in this version, an image of hope.

The broadcasters are just now sniffing us out.

I am pregnant but don’t know it and can’t know

the fetus would have been, in any event, not viable.

No one survives. No one comes down with cancer.

The fade-out leaves a black screen over the sound of water.

The review says it is a film noir. The letter to the editor

says the reviewer should go back to college. The reviewer

is in graduate school writing a thesis about movies

that were never made. If they are made he will not get tenure.

If we die he has a small chance at success. A young woman

writes in: it should, more properly, have been called an embryo.