Alacrity—not my middle name—
boldly lays siege, item by item, to a miasmic to-do
catalog approaching zeal. That’s someone else’s
doppelgänger, not mine. I’m more
easy-going (except when I’m not), a laissez-
faire drop-by-whenever,
give-what-you-can kind of gal, list-less.
However you slice it, whatever its name,
I gave up on musts and have-to’s
just after my brother jumped from a bridge,
knocking us from fixed
latitudes and longitudes like so
many pick up sticks or dominoes, cascading
nihilistically toward a place
our eyes are still adjusting to three years later.
Perhaps it’s relevant that my middle name,
quixotically, is Joy—claimed, lost, now
reclaimed anew, a virtue
so mismatched to my guilt
that I gathered it, stick by fucking plastic colored stick,
until it resembled a structure,
vulnerable but still standing—a cairn
wobbling ever so slightly at the
x-roads of a trailhead, aching to dance.
You can choose this route or that, bla-
zing in possibility, open to the winds,
amid parting seas and timbrels or
battle your brother at the Jabbok
circa: the rest of your God-given
days. I choose both shores.
Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and the forthcoming Every Single Beast of My Heart (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have received two Best of the Net nominations and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. Some of her other publications include Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Pinch, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Mudfish, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Epiphany, and Slippery Elm. An ordained rabbi, Pam lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
