My crone (jewish penicillin)                                                        

Moochie, make your way down the street.

Tennis-ball that walker.

Boil your bone broth—

                                                      make it a beaut.

I work both windows at the drive-through.

Ball-capped loggers in gun-racked

pick-ups order moka-la-ti-da’s

sweetened with syrup.

You keep the coffee in a jar, oily

with heavy cream,

just in case company comes by.

I weave a map, then mess the threads

about, belly swole stiff, decaf-sad.

Tamping those grounds

                                                      like I mean it.

Your obit—Ballet dancer born in British

Hong Kong survives Auschwitz.

Gnaomi Siemens holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of The Arts in poetry and literary translation. Her words can be found at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Believer, Slice Magazine, Europe Now Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Penny Thoughts (UK), and American Chordata, among others in the US and abroad. She has read from her translations at The British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition in London, was selected by The Poetry Society of New York for a residency at the iconic Mid-Manhattan branch of The New York Public Library, and was a 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow. She lives in New York City.