A cine-poem about the space between suffering and life lived. It’s also about survival and the unforgotten pain.

The Poem:
Pregnant with the Dead
by Susan Rich

I am a woman swollen with the history of my dead,
great aunts and second cousins murdered

in the old country—bloated with fragments of survivors

who hid months in garbage cans, others in partisan forests;
I’m their bandaged daughters gauzed from toe to forehead

to keep safe from search patrols, from their first rapes.

Yes, I am a body awash in stories of noodle kugel, borscht—
watch the heavy arms of the women waving like sails

as they knead challah each Friday morning,

can’t conceive of a few hours free.
What can I do with the women who occupy my vertebrae,

take over my hips and tongue?

They say coconut bars, mundel bread, hamantaschen.
They say that’s your problem as they stride

into my kitchen, toss out the nonfat yogurt, the tofu treats.

It is a rumba of before and after.
And of course, many volk murdered—

abducted our young girls, butchered our sons.

And now, my dead tell me, it’s time to enjoy
a brioche—a week in the Disneyland.

Don’t my dead deserve to mist their skin with Shalimar

at the airport perfume cathedrals?
Enough time spent on nightmares!

Instead let us hike up the heat, make selfies.

And later, when it quiets on the hotel balcony,
we vanish like light vessels, almost escaped out to sea.

Published in CCAR, Fall 2019, forthcoming in 101 Jewish Poems for the 3rd Millennium

Credit:
Film — Tova Beck-Friedman
Poem — Susan Rich
Dancer — Juliet Neidish
Cinematography —Tova Beck-Friedman & Avis Boone
Editing — Tova Beck-Friedman
Sound recording — Jack Straw
Archival footage - from the public domain
Music — Yusuke Tsutsumi “Lamentation for Those Rootless”

Screening:
NewMediaFest2020 at the Torrance Art Museum Los Angeles, 18 July 2020

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