Wake, You Sleepers From Your Sleep!, and: No One's Loves, No One's Wives

Wake, You Sleepers From Your Sleep!, and: No One's Loves, No One's Wives Jessica Jacobs (bio) —Maimonides, on the message of the shofar blasts each Jewish New Year WAKE, YOU SLEEPERS FROM YOUR SLEEP! Are creatures' only value the soundswe make through them? How their hideshide and protect us? How their bloodgreases the clanking wheel of our plots, easing our narratives forward?It is their skin on which our storiesare written. You, sons who flayed the coatfrom your brother, the skin from a goat, who dipped the first in the blood of the secondto fleece your fatherinto thinking Joseph savaged by an animal,when the only animals there were you— listen past the blasts to their source.Your smooth-skinned father Jacob,who slaughtered a goat to impersonatehis hairy brother, wearing its skin to fool your blind grandfatherover a shared dish of its flesh. His fatherIsaac, begat by Abrahamwho pulled a last-minute ram from the thicket End Page 61 to slaughter in Isaac's stead: a surrogate sonbound and slit-throated on the altar. From that ram,the sinews that strung David's harp, the skinthat girded the loins of Elijah, the horns sheared off and hollowed, hallowed into sacred instrumentsused to mark a new moon, a new battle, the startof a new year, which marks the battlewith ourselves, ten days of trembling repentance, the ritual wail that forces us backto Abraham's wind-raked mountain,the looming knife, the moment of choosingwhich life to end, which power to serve, and maybe even earlier, when we could have chosennot to be there at all. Look outside yourself.Even now, a flock of shofars grazes the field.Their lips parse the tangled browse: listen: the soft separationof stalks from the dirt, the greengrind of their teeth. Each living thingis its own call to attention. End Page 62 Rachel said to Jacob, "Here is my maid Bilhah. Consort with her, that she may bear on my knees and that through her I too may have children." —Genesis 30:3 When Leah saw that she had stopped bearing children, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as concubine. —Genesis 30:9 NO ONE'S LOVES, NO ONE'S WIVES we were just kitchens: four handsto make his meals, two ovens to makehis sons. Unlike those bickering sisters,at least we had each other. In the listof matriarchs, our names are scribedin lemon juice. To see them,you must hold that text to the fire. End Page 63 Jessica Jacobs Jessica Jacobs is author of Take Me with You, Wherever You Are Going (2019), winner of the Devil's Kitchen and Goldie Awards; Pelvis with Distance (2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and coauthor of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (2020). Both of the poems published here will be published in unalone, her collection of poems in conversation with the book of Genesis, by Four Way Books in March 2024. She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. Copyright © 2024 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.