There was this Orthodox Jewish girl Yifat – brown hair, brown eyes, same height, same age, which was eighteen, seventeen, eighteen. She had a big sunhat, not a sunhat, army hat and somehow a meeting was arranged. We were on an excavation. I was digging out a cistern, you had to take a rope ladder to climb down this dry well, and somehow she was supposed to come to visit and the head guy gave me a crash course in Hebrew, wrote her name on the inside of an artifact box and said yifat means yafeh which means beautiful. He wrote יפעת and יפה on the inside of an artifact box, closed it on the ancient coin we had just found. She came down the ladder and I held the bottom for her and I gave her a tour. She’s Orthodox so I had to make sure not to touch her in any way and at the end of the week she gave me a stone and it had – oh, this is a long story – maybe erase the whole cistern thing.
Poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
Bio:
AARON RABINOWITZ writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. He won PRISM international’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, Meridian’s Short Prose Prize, and CANSCAIP’s Writing for Children Competition. He has been writer in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, PLAYA in Oregon, and Writing Between the Vines in California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, Grain, the Masters Review, the Malahat Review, and Humber Literary Review, among other publications.