Emma Goldman-Sherman
I was born in Philadelphia’s Temple
Hospital, Jewish & full of the devil
& the demerol they gave my mother
perfection in satin & manicured
popping gum & smoking such fun
at 24 & pissed for sure at what
they said was a girl. She dropped
her ashes on my baby skin
to smile & watch it burn.
I was born from Philadelphia’s love
of brothers instead of sisters, pretzels
instead of bagels, eagles instead of all the birds
one could love in the wide leg-spread skies. Emma Goldman-Sherman
I was born of Philadelphia’s lies
between my mother outta Girl’s High
& my dad from Cheltenham
entangled at my mother’s first job
in the secretarial pool where she got wet
tormenting the boss’s son with her gum-
cracking jaw he wanted to see open wider Emma Goldman-Sherman
those gunpowder lips my mother licked
a mouth full of curses sent shocks
up my father’s spine such a sexy hole
she let him punish her for every dirty word
he heard as if she purred fur pleasure
until she said they had to get hitched
in Philadelphia’s Bellevue Stratford
with 300 Jews dancing the hora in 1962.
It took her 3 years of an anxious chain-
smoking gestation to finally give birth to me
mistaken as female in Philadelphia’s Temple
Hospital, Jewish & queer as fuck, confused
& hungering for a breast I’d never get.
Listen to Emma Goldman-Sherman’s Abraham’s Daughters at The Parsnip Ship
