Women's Work

Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife.

—Genesis 16:3

All of them—Abram, Sarai, and Hagar—born
into a time of quiet. No 
radio line hum, no buzz from broken 
transformers. You could hear 
the cattle in the far field.
It's hard to imagine that level of quiet,
how you could hear Abram's footfall, 
how it differed from Sarai’s
as it approached the flap in Hagar's tent,
the tent made of goat skin from the goat 
Hagar raised and fed and chastised 
and chased and eventually, 
whose throat she slit.
The goat whose carcass she butchered,
meat she seared, whose hide she scraped,
softened with its own brains, her own urine 
because she knew how and she could. 
And now as this supple skin
Hagar stretched and tied
is lifted, it whispers survive.

Deborah Bacharach

First published in Pembroke Magazine

The Firmament

It was one of those summers 
we climbed out windows, 
swam in the lake on hot days 
and days that weren't that hot. 

We baked Alaska in a rented oven,
told jokes on the floor.
The jokes, the cake, exquisitely delicious.  

It was one of those summers 
we laughed with banjos, 
sat in the front row on the grass.
Ate blueberries, sang voraciously. 

We did not steal each other's lovers 
or even borrow them for a few hours 
in a hot dark basement.  

See us there in a head to belly chain—
Mikala to Ellie to Debby 
to Annie—full of matter, all aglow,
all around the world we went.

Deborah Bacharach