by Ivy Raff
You mean you could poison anyone on earth
& you didn’t choose me? Her mouth an O.
She wasn’t wholly wrong: temptation it was
to flick a grain of cyanide salt at its center.
We got bigger fish to fry, ma. She didn’t
laugh at the pun. I sprinkled
the poison into the batter. Adjusted my KN-95
against the dust, which prompted her to fix
her own. Thirty-two years of resentment
a’simmer; still – still – we mirror.
Could you pass the tilapia, please.
Bibi would be there any minute.
Saturday sun soon to set on our Shabbat.
At Birthright, Eyal curled his mouth &
lored, In 1947 Arabs protested the law:
no work on Saturdays. They lost but
they were right. It is a Jewish thing,
our Shabbat. I broke the law for Netanyahu
would come for Havdalah dinner –
this was the ruse. Early I began
to mix, chop, beat. Everything had to be
perfect. It’s not every day you get
the chance to murder a prime minister
in hot blood. So let us pray.
Do we have to? she whined. No one’s more
religious than an atheist, boy. Yes, ma. Prayer
does more for us than for g?d. She didn’t
understand but bowed her head anyway.
Punched the switch on the stereo, muttered
at least we’ll get a break from your music
even though she loved reggae first.
G?d, bless us with the courage & the strength
to smite Netanyahu today, for we act in your Name.
We sanctify life; absolutists we’re not. We kill
so the olive trees may reach their tortured
twists of branches toward their stewards
forever more. If ‘ashjar al-zeytoun are family we see
who feeds them & who sends soldiers
to tear them from soil. We surrender Netanyahu
back to You, g?d. You don’t make mistakes & so
you have not mistaken us for people who won’t
poison a head of state. Thank you
Father. Amen.
I averted my eyes when my mother
rolled her eyes. More important she shouldn’t
burn the fish. Oil, which bubbled
while we prayed, graveyarded seven battered
filets. My mother laid them side by side
in the fryolator. I quick-pickled
cabbage, mashed avocado, spooned
sour cream in a prep bowl. I’d bought
a comal just for this, his last supper.
Rolled masa in my hands, pressed those
yellow balls between iron plates &
fantasized that innuendo come alive.
They’re ready, my mother spat.
I still don’t like this. There has to be
another way. There’s not. I heard
the hosts shuffle chairs, then
his guttural thank-yous in English
outside the kitchen’s swinging doors.
I layered crisp fish, aguacate, escabeche,
y crema over tortillas. One last
pinch of potassium cyanide. Squeeze of
lime for je ne sais quoi.
Goodbye, Babylon, goodbye…
goodbye Sizzla Kalonji sang
from my playlist. On upturned
fingertips I balanced the plate, stepped
forward to the dining room.
The Havdalah candle’s triple blaze
answered my heart’s missing beats.
Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2025), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Her Best of the Net nominated poems appear in Ninth Letter, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, as well as in the anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Systems Project Manager, a member of Seventh Wave Magazine’s editorial team.