Hezy Leskly, translated by Adriana X. Jacobs


I’m six, on a walk with my parents, Saturday late afternoon


My father—the hammer poised above the plate,
My mother—the snake of love,
And I—a girl with a dick;
We set out on the path
traced with my tongue.
When I tried
to eat from the plate
at the edge of the path,
the hammer struck the fingers
of my left hand,
and the snake of love smiled and commanded: Shpatzirn!
We walked along sparse woodlands and main streets,
We walked along waterways and abandoned mines.
And when we sat for a moment on a couch with broken springs,
we ate
yeast cake
and drank
canned juice.
Sometimes there was no sagging couch,
so we walked ahead,
our noses bleeding,
our legs erasing the path
that my tongue traced
the tongue of a son who killed his parents
step by step.


The Smile


Susanna weeps at night
the same Susanna
who weeps with so much longing
in Wallace Stevens’ poem.

And in that poem
she has
Byzantine attendants the American poet
refers to as the simpering Byzantines.

If I had a band
I’d call it:
“Weeping Susanna and the Simpering Byzantines.”
We’d jam in Ashdod:

O Susanna! O, don’t you cry for me,
I’ve come from Alabama, wid’ my Banjo on my knee.

Translation: When I brought the gun to my mouth, I smiled,
and when I drew it out, I cried

so much.

 

Hezy Leskly (1952–1994) was an Israeli-born Hebrew poet, choreographer, and dance critic who lived most of his life in the environs of Tel Aviv, apart from a pivotal period in the Netherlands in the 1970s. His published poetry collections include The Mice and Leah Goldberg (Ha-akhbarim ve-Leah Goldberg, 1992) and Dear Perverts (Sotim yekarim, 1994), which was published shortly after his death of AIDS-related complications.

Adriana X. Jacobs is the translator of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski’s End— (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023), and author of the microcollection Afterlife is Sweet (rinky dink press, 2023). She is an associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2024