Issue 1.2
Fall 2021
Joshua
Gottlieb-Miller
Reflection
​
"Have I always been suspicious of myself?" is from my manuscript Dybbuk Americana, which is, as I am, wrestling with Jewish identity in America, and what it means for my son to inherit that identity. Many of the poems in Dybbuk Americana are non-linear, animated by boxes of various size and placement containing an array of running commentary, lyric reveries, ironic doubts, counter-myths, found texts, oral history, and more, echoing literary heritages of Talmudic disputation and geniza. My poems seek out multiple meanings and interpretations just as I have tried to discover who I am, and learned that I don’t know everything about me.
Have I Always Been Suspicious of Myself?
The rainy day my parents married,
my father signed two contracts:
one with my mother,
the other with her rabbi.
Because they loved each other,
the first contract.
Because I was raised Jewish,
the second.
History moves this way,
backwards, precarious.
Not passing
but passed.
Almost writing to him about ‘your
Why did I ever think I
would know myself
like Talmud
when I don’t/know Talmud?
forebears’ instead of ‘our—'
My dad asking, “When were Swedes
considered white?”
What description isn’t
incomplete? I talk like him, I write
like him, I too
have what he calls his father’s
coldness. Pathologically
consistent, how unfair am I
to not be him,
after all? To regret he had
no real deep faith for me
to reject. All his life
he’s been a searcher.
Though I am
made beautiful by righteous
anger, it means that from a distance
I give two names.
I’m selfish,
I am, I always have been.
Still there’s no consensus
about my highest point.
Who can blame me?
Last night I remarked to the snow
that it doesn’t need
the sky.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller received his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Poetry from Dybbuk Americana is forthcoming in Poet Lore, and found most recently in Berru Poetry Series, Jewish Currents, Miracle Monocle, and elsewhere. Writing from his hybrid grocery store manuscript The Art of Bagging can be found in MAYDAY, Talking Writing, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Currently Joshua tutors for Houston Community College, is a weekend desk attendant for the Menil Collection, and teaches a senior memoir workshop for Inprint through the JCC.
Joshua's Book Recommendations
Tom Haviv, A Flag of No Nation.
Rosebud Ben-Oni, If This Is the Age We End Discovery.
E.G. Asher, Natality.
Aviya Kushner, Wolf Lamb Bomb.
Allison Pitinii Davis, Line Study of a Motel Clerk