Erin Mizrahi

Dick Erasure

                        from Louis C.K.'s Apology

Translation

Men are always telling me about David Foster Wallace

And “This American Life”

Like they’re spreading the good word

I want to ask them 

What kind of language will you mother?

I want to ask them

Where is Ana Mendieta?

And

How many times can you pack up a life before home is another word for translation?

I used to have an older lover

He was always talking about people dying

And how time is precious

And I thought he should lighten up

And now I have a younger lover

And he tells me I should lighten up

Because I tell him

Time is precious!

I tell him

People are dying!

I told my cousin Stella who survived Auschwitz

that I’m a Holocaust Studies scholar

She said 

Tell me

What does it mean?

Holocaust Studies?

And for the first time I wasn’t so sure

We talked about Jerusalem

And what it means to believe so much

In something with so little room

And now I see 

the more you run from a thing

The closer you pull it to your chest

Erin Mizrahi is a Los Angeles-based poet, scholar, and educator who fell in love with words when she was very young and has never recovered. She is completing a PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC, where she has taught writing composition for four years and where she discovered her passion for teaching is just as strong as her passion for writing. Her dissertation, "The Sense of Silence," explores the role of silence as testimony in performance art, poetry, literature, and cinema. As a fellow at The USC Shoah Foundation, she researched silence in genocide testimony.