Dear Reader,

We began this project as a commitment to writing through real time and place. For us, time and place are not abstract concepts, but distinctive material conditions that shape the architecture of thought and feeling. Over seven months, the twelve letters below traversed between continents.

Our correspondence finds its origin in Sabile, Latvia, where emet’s Jewish family lived for generations. The Jews of Sabile were dispossessed not once, but twice—first in May 1915 by Russian soldiers and again in August 1940 by German and Latvian soldiers. emet visited the region for the first time in August 2023. By writing a letter to Rachel, they entered the wound of annihilation in company. “What does it mean to belong to a place?” emet asks, “& what if that belonging skips a generation?”

Rachel writes from Seattle. She was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, where her maternal Jewish family lived for five generations. This exodus leaves not a festering wound, but a vacancy to which she addresses poems in her debut collection Dear Memphis. From Seattle, blanketed in the West Coast’s seasonal wildfire smoke, Rachel asks emet: “Do I carry the kind of commitment it takes to taste particulate musk and stay in place?”

In order to find the depth of inquiry we were seeking, we needed a slower pace. We’ve been programmed to rapidly ingest and regurgitate content every day—what alternative mode might the handwritten letter offer us? Could we accentuate rather than collapse our different geographies? The letter offers a temporal/spatial accordion. Rather than use the fast-paced immediacy of the internet, we turned to an inefficient system of communication.

A letter can be lost. A letter can be returned. A letter can be smeared in transit, illegible by the time it arrives. A letter can also be intercepted by the State, opened and perused for its contents. Letters can be smuggled through borders—a love letter slipped into a suitcase, a postcard strapped to the thigh. In 1921, a small collection of postcards was carried from Sabile, Latvia, to Cleveland, Ohio, where emet’s family immigrated after their dispossesion and deportation. Rachel’s family archive includes letters from her grandfather, kept in a suitcase for half a century and exposed only after his death. Yet the suitcase contained only one half of the correspondence; no record remains of the other side. This is often how letters are published: one writer’s correspondence, sent to a single recipient or many, bound up in a volume which spans many years. We know this shape, and we chose another: one that created a resonance between us.

We imagine ourselves as part of a lineage of writers working collaboratively, reaching toward a magic that can only be found in the company of the other—something akin to the spiritual communion found within a poem. Our exchange summons the correspondence between Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen (1945–1971), and the letters between poets Pat Parker and Audre Lorde (1974–1989). Our title “The Correspondent’s Cheeks Are as a Bed of Spices” is pulled from an epistolary exchange between two rabbis in the sixteenth century. The phrase itself is an echo of a verse found in Shir haShirim, Song of Songs 5:13. “His cheeks were like beds of spices yielding perfumes.” The variation of the phrase, introduced into the context of a specific exchange, laces the language of the holy and the mundane. That this erotic phrase was included in the everyday letter-writing of rabbis prompted us to ask: How do you hide in plain sight, while revealing the self at the same time?

The erotics of revelation and concealment, of articulation and withholding, craft a tension that we work with intimately and concretely in our poetic practices. Before this project, we hardly knew each other, but we’d read each other’s poems. We began writing our letters with the intention of sharing them, which introduced a formal constraint—knowing they would be seen by more than the immediate correspondent. The distinction between private and public blurred; trust in the other’s attunement was essential.

Our handwritten letters mirror the way we go to the page as poets: a conduit running from the heart to the page, ink an extension of our circulation. Draft after draft after draft until we arrive at what it is we mean to say. Our exchanges weren’t predetermined: though we texted intermittently between letters, the epistolary correspondence held its own gravity—each of us with our own pull, our own vocabularies, and the letters themselves, their own body.

We wrote in the present, toward a future in which our words would be read by the other. And in the waiting, our lives expanded. Spiderwebs built and split. Bird migrations, literary conferences. The unrelenting horror of witnessing genocide. And when the time came to write back, a condensation of material was necessary. When we write in the present, we offer a past to the future. The letter a conduit through which all times touch. Whatever happens in transit, our words, extensions of our hands, lands with each other—and now, with you.

Love,

Rachel and emet

  
Below, images of the letters alternate with typed transcripts. Listen to emet and Rachel read their letters here:

August 10, 2023

Dear Rachel,

I’m writing to you from Sabile, Latvia. The landscape devastates me with color and beauty. Birch trees pucker the horizon, and the fields are full of thistles and clover. It’s been 100 years since my family fled this place—they were initially deported by the Russian army in 1915 alongside 200,000 Jews. My great-grandfather left for the USA in 1921; & here I am, returning. Although I’m not quite sure that’s the right word for it. Language barks in my mouth like a dog. Grief nettles my eyes. What does it mean to belong to a place? & What if that belonging skips a generation?

At the center of the town is the synagogue. After the war, it was turned into a vegetable factory. Now it’s a cultural center, painted a nasty burnt orange. The language of deportation, massacre, and capture is difficult to translate. It’s hardly even speech, let alone sound. But it is a shape. A circling. A gap in the jaw.

Sabile is covered in storks, who are preparing to migrate south for winter. Each morning, the river valley fills with their braying bodies. Such long-necked beings, such persistent bellows. Their orange feet curl into pique as their feathered bodies lift. Watching them cylinder the sky, my stomach balloons with an inexpressible longing. How I want to join them! Perhaps I already have. Perhaps all my dead reincarnated as storks. Perhaps I will follow.

Love,
emet

Aug 25 / 8 עלול

Dear emet,

Reading your letter, I felt my shoulders curl forward, trying to capture your ache. My belly, hollowed and stiff, prepared to metabolize your pain myself—this is the pose my mothers taught me, the pose I strain to reshape.

Here in my chosen home of Seattle, spiderwebs cross all the still portals. The spiders’ dry season now entwines with yellow air from Cascade wildfires, for which some human always bears the blame. I pace my tiny garden, watering nozzle in hand. Look for a shimmer. How many angles can I check and still inadvertently destroy a night’s labor?

I tried to choose a “better” home, but the stream of disaster keeps widening. Do I carry the kind of commitment it takes to taste particulate musk and stay in place? Not buttoned inside; still blooming.

My nose clogs, and my vision cuts out at the corners. Drawn inward, I crave rupture. Thank God this is the Jewish month of Elul / עלול: the shofar blows, and I break open.

Love,
Rachel

September 9, 2023

Dear Rachel,

Your letter was waiting for me when I returned to Berlin from Latvia. I read & re-read your sentences, stumbling over the word “home.” My throat is so clogged from the ghosts of deportation that I wonder if home is something we can even have? Such an American fantasy.

Perhaps I am a pilgrimage of nests, held together by another country’s inattention. “Overlook me just a little longer!” I chirp to blue-soaked sky.

Last night I drank mediocre wine at a mediocre bar with my best friend in Berlin. 6 euro. She had just returned from a visit to Alexandria, where she was born. We asked one another how to move through all this betrayal of land, of people, of occupation, of nation-state.

Curious for your thoughts, as always. I know that these questions are not mine alone. They constellate me to you, and to the sky. Still, my nests rot. Your home fills with wildfire smoke.

By the time my sentences reach you, it will already be a new year.

Wherever you are, no matter the grief, I hope you drool honey all over your tongue!

L’Shana Tova.

Love,
emet

P.S. bird feathers from the garden outside my writing studio <3. I think the small ones are black-capped chickadee’s.

9.24.23 / 9 Tishrei

Dear emet,

The rain is here. Your letter arrived on what might’ve been my last day biking in half-fingered gloves. The maple pod enclosed has been drying all summer; the yellow cottonwood leaf must’ve dropped this week. Last night I saw my friend’s anti-fascist Yiddish band play at a folk music society. She had the mostly white and over-sixty crowd chant “Fuck the police!” Maybe the sound carried outside the hall, but surely we each carry its resonance.

Words I know in my bones carry into my breath and out of my hold. I started studying Yiddish in January. Listening to one song, I picked out mir—we, mit—with, tsusamen—together, in the language my father’s parents used for secrets. What might a language become after being silenced for a generation? Can revival also carry the weight of repair?

You asked how we can move through. I’ll try for why, for now. To deliver beans and bread to grieving friends. To repeat after a student saying the name of the region they fled. To chant kol nidre together tonight. To write to you.

Love,
Rachel

7 October, 2023

Dear Rachel,

Berlin’s rainy season has also arrived. When I biked to class this week, I got soaked in a sudden downpour—clouds, heaving. Rain, pelting. I arrived sopping wet, fabric of my clothes gripping my flesh.

Here, in Berlin, I walk through a torrent of mute ghosts. From this field of apparitions, notions of revival and repair carry a hollow sound. Maybe this is ungenerous of me. Maybe I feel this way because all of Europe is an empty shul. mir, mit, tsusamen… how I long for the silenced language to become a haunting!

On Sunday, I drove with two friends to Linum, a small town about an hour outside of Berlin. We went for the crane migration. Common cranes, on their way to Occupied Palestine for the winter. I trudged through damp air and brown grass for hours. Saw nothing but some mediocre geese and a glitch of starlings. And then, just as the sun was setting, thousands of cranes split the horizon! I stood transfixed, annihilated by their braying and v-shaped wing language. How to explain? My heart darting to the horizon, swelling with glee. The rapture and internal completeness I feel in the mass company of birds, birds, birds! Their relentlessness cast a spell over the field, an open wound. What I’m trying to tell you: I was in this place and I did not know it.

In love & birdsong,
emet

P.S. These stickers are from a recent protest in Berlin (designed by Virgil B/G Taylor!).

Nov. 4 / 20 כשׂון

Dear emet,

Where do I begin? You sent your last letter on the day the war began, before you knew. Since then, more than 9,000 people have died in Occupied Palestine. Beloveds of my beloveds are anchors stuck in the siege. Each loss, an unfathomable trench. In Bethlehem, a dear one’s cousins are stuck inside, hiding from settlers determined to disappear boys. I wonder where my great-grandparents hid when pogroms hit their shtetls: root cellars? Attics?

Yesterday I took the day off work to lock my body to a line of other Jews blocking the doors to a senator’s office building. Cops shoved us onto cold brick at the start, but we held. A rally gathered. We sang, chanted over and over for ceasefire now the day after the House signed 14.3 billion dollars in aid for genocide.

U.S. bombs + U.S. fighter jets = Palestinian deaths. Some people try to make it calculus, said a reverend in a beautiful brocade coat. She led us in Somebody’s been hurting my people, and I imagined us voicing an embodied divine, the one our tradition calls the shekhinah. She travels among us, landing amidst the wreckage like your storks. Have they reached their destination? Are their nests there to return to?

Yesterday the shofar’s call resounded off the downtown brick and glass—wake up! wake up! wake up! Can your mute ghosts sense the vibration? Berlin, I know, has outlawed all demonstrations for Palestine. Here, I am farther from the hostages in tunnels and the settlers’ pogroms, but my collective voice—the liberty to have one—makes me think I might feel closer to the world to come where Palestine is free. May it be, keyn yehiratzon, within our lifetime.

Love,
Rachel

P.S.: The stamps are by my comrade Wendy Elisheva Somerson.

November 18, 2023

Dear Rachel,

Every day is a year. Language and history turn to dust in my throat. When I open my mouth, ash falls out. How to speak?

This week, the phrase “stop the genocide” was outlawed. Palestinian flags and keffiyehs continue to be banned under the smokescreen of “anti-semitic activity.” The political repression and surveillance is astounding. My neighborhood is under police siege. Constant sirens and arrests. Germany’s weaponization of “antisemitism” enrages me. Each week, new laws restricting immigration, mobilization.

It pains me to see how some Jews are seizing this moment to fawn over the State… anything to enshrine a permanent victimhood. At the demo on Thursday night for a Free Palestine, a child led us in the chant: “augen auf! augen auf!”— open your eyes! open your eyes! I turn to the ejected Jewish ghosts rummaging through the Rhine River. They are no longer mute. Their cries and screams reach me in the morning alongside the caw of the crow….

In the mounting political repression, fear hounds me. Each morning I repeat to myself, like a spell: we will not be intimidated!

Keep pushing, keep organizing, keep boycotting. I’m with you, with all of us, from an ocean away.

Love,
emet
אמת

P.S. On Tuesday I’m taking the train to Lublin, Poland for an artist residency. I’ll be researching with the ghosts… beautiful landscapes in place of our people. Beautiful landscapes….

12.10.23 / 27 כּסלו

emet,

Here, the Duwamish waterway chokes on destruction, and the waste of it all offends me. So much of the refuse could’ve helped us live. You write from a place of recent genocide of our people. I write from a place where we became instruments of a state that drools over death, ever unsated.

At a ceasefire vigil on shabbes, my friend WES spoke about the Maccabes—our Khanike protagonists—and what they did after the miracle. They conquered, they pillaged, they forced conversions. They flipped from guerillas to fascists as soon as the power switched. Can light and blessing oust such tyranny?

On the radio, a local rabbi avoided the words genocide and Palestine as he spoke about rising anti-semitism and Jewish pride. I know what he was implying: the trope of the self-hating Jew is a wrinkled paper bag, worn translucent. At actions, I wear my tallit and kippa to make my refusal visibly Jewish. Tallit my mother wove and tied, kippa from my brother’s wedding. Neither of them has chosen to stand there with me.

Here, will you sing with me to loosen our grief’s clenched fist?

Love,
Rachel

P.S.: My first book, Dear Memphis, comes out in a month and a half. Here’s a postcard of the cover, a photo taken by my granddad in the city where our Jewish family lived for five generations.

December 23, 2023

Dear Rachel,

I pasted the postcard of your book to my fridge—how I wish I could be in Seattle for your debut! To hear five generations of breath inflating your poems.

I’ve been reading Emile Habiby’s Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter. In his introduction to the text, Habiby speaks of “carrying two watermelons under one arm—that is, taking up both politics & literature.” Whenever I sit down to write, his phrase reverberates in my mind & in my arms.

This week in Berlin, 170 police officers raided the homes of six activists & a café. More censorship, more repression, & more migration restrictions.

“Do you believe the State of Israel has a right to exist?” a Ukrainian woman asked me in a café. Rachel, I wanted to punch her! These Western abstractions, these Western word games! My belief—or absolute lack thereof—cannot stop the bombs, the white phosphorous, or the war machine’s tanks. From inside this mockery of language, I babble and blurt.

“Bird, bird, bird” I told the lady.

“You are anti-semitic,” she said.

In the distance, the American angel of genocide clapped his hands. It is like this everywhere. Parking lots and Kentucky Fried Chickens. Propinquity. Bird, bird, bird.

I’m singing with you from an ocean away. Don’t stop.

Love,
emet
אמת

1.20.24 / 10 שׁבט

Dear emet,

The urge to throw a punch courses through your ink, ejects the breath from my lungs, and hollows a cave in my chest. Our wings flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap flap—the genocide sails calmly on.

Winter paused here last weekend. Song sparrows hopped over the marsh’s surface pecking at grasses stuck below the ice. In the swim of this time, I reach for an anchor in the image. Yesterday, the student newspaper at the high school where I teach published a feature on symbols of Palestinian resistance: the spoon, the olive tree, the watermelon. Every squiggle of ink is a fiber outstretched towards a rope. I almost feel it catch. What haunts the other end of the line? What does it feel like to carry the real weight, and what changes when we carry the effigy?

Stay with me here, dear emet.

Love,
Rachel

P.S.: Here’s Dear Memphis. In interviews about it I’ve been telling my interlocutors I’m going to talk about Palestine. They nod and ask How? emet, you know the question is How can we not?

10 February, 2024

Dear Rachel,

Yesterday, I heard the honking geese for the first time since October. It seems they have begun their migration back north. I welcome them with open arms, open wings.

I’ve been thinking about your questions, carrying them with me through Berlin’s grey haze. Where does an image begin & where does it end? What haunts the end of the line? In trying to answer you, my thoughts became tangled with history’s refuse. The past clogs the drain of the present. Overlapping memory, parallel ghosts. Best not to think alone.

I turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (trans. by Betsy Wing). Glissant writes:

“No imagination helps avert destitution in reality, none can oppose oppressions or sustain those who ‘withstand’ in body or spirit. But imagination changes mentalities, however slowly it may go about this…”

I know you’re here with me, pecking for what’s stuck under the ice and tending to what’s beneath the image. Mentality. Mentality.

I’m trying to trust that in 1915, when my family was deported from their village in Latvia, someone was pecking for the same….

Love,
emet אמת

P.S. Thank you for sending Dear Memphis! What a gift. The texture of the paper is exquisite. I’m so looking forward to being with your work, your epistles, in this new form.

3.22.24 / 22 אדר

Dear emet,

Today is my first shabbes at home in a month. My wrist and neck reverberate from all the impacts they gathered in travel. Maybe my joints are reminding me how movement without can clog movement within.

Thank you for sharing Glissant’s thinking in Wing’s words. In my travels, I got to think with so many friends. My AWP panel, “Scriptural Entanglements,” crackled electric, five poets so distinctly devoted to visioning with our ancestors’ texts.

Our mentalities felt charged in alignment after we’d all participated, the previous day, in a vigil for martyred children of Gaza. Organizers read names aloud, starting from the youngest, and we, hundreds in the gathered crowd held up their ages on our fingers. My right thumb kept the curl of that 0 for so long . . .

And now, back home, my hands are drawn to the dirt. I’m still getting pelted by sleet as I bike over bridges, but the light’s stretching longer. Today when I clawed over a dandelion crown crowding my oregano, its long root slid easily out.

Let me show you my garden someday?

Love,
Rachel רחל