l'chaim to the bar mitzvah (a.k.a a toast) by Oz Leshem (15, New Mexico)*

[Content warning: mentions of suicide, strong language]
After Kevin Coval. For Shlomo. Aba means Father.

​i.
my manhood was a notebook full of suicide letters and a dictionary of
people shaped into fiction and lavender. my manhood was lyric dug
into every grave next to my grandfather’s, it was the tombstone woven
into the soil like god had became human. suddenly, soon i knew that
my manhood became desperate and wanted to vacate humanhood.

my manhood was suburbia, i just hadn’t found it yet; my manhood was
shlomo not aba, his manhood was predator,

                                            my manhood felt like the day he died

---

​sometimes i wish i had spat in aba’s eyes when he would tell me that shlomo’s manhood
was a mocking of his family. although the devil wasn’t something he brought up often,
the colonialism in aba’s bones was meticulous enough for him to refer to his homeland as
sinful

restless; the bar mitzvah ceremony had
just begun. it was springtime. my hands
shaky when i woke up, i smelled pepper
pirouetting with a coffee bean

ii.
asleep, i remembered looking at the north
star thinking shlomo had touched the moon.
foolish me, sometimes i mixed up venus
with the north star, and i couldn’t remember
if it was leukemia or a heart attack

foolish me thinking that my friends
wouldn’t raise their arms grazing their ears
head down, trying not to laugh and getting
death stares from my jewish-girl crush.
foolish me thinking aba would be around
much longer, or when i wonder what
would’ve happened if he stayed a while

iii.
perhaps my masculinity was dissected when i spoke. or
maybe it was when the fervor in my throat had risen,
therefore the ideas gulped inside me had choked on the
breath off of the tongue

the dentist holds plastics, and soon my lips strung a lisp from the retainer. the plaque rips
gums how my molars used to thaw out the pink of it with blood.

my teeth were a neighborhood gentrified to construct the perfect skyline. built with the
slang of aba’s generation on the forms of a proper jewish boy in puberty. my grandpa was
woodstock mixtapes when on deathbed and peach pits near the get better soon cards. or
dreams of boning joan rivers, or allen ginsberg: fuck the jews, no jew intended, no
entendre intended. it leaks like gas

puns sting like needles

aba carved out my sephardic and pitted my ashkenazi against him, foolish aba for telling
me that the word Palestine had no place in our home, because he said it is nowhere.
foolish shlomo for marrying safta who refused his birthplace, lay sephardic, he did— in a
home with a wife who did not accept his masculinity

                                                       iv.
                                                       foolish me, for thinking a bar mitzvah would do the trick. a
                                                       bar mitzvah would do the trick, wanting to treat me as if a
                                                       bar mitzvah means i serve israel.

                                            foolish aba, for denying the Black in Moses, Mohammed Pakistan
                                 for           Allah             silent crimson in the Dead Sea.

                                  the only other place in the world that could be called the four corners israel
                      cornered colonies or in other words,
colonizers, also known as,
                      trump allies, also known as,
                                    netanyahu, also known as,
                                                 benny gantz, also known as the jews of Palestine

when i close my eyes, i liberate, because my manhood
is
aba-less, and left to deal with his toxicity through his diaspora, scurrying through every memory
trying to find the one about

his suicide,

in every moment,

suddenly,

                                                                                        i'm a fool (sheani tipesh)