The Primordial Catastrophe in the Process of Creation

by Maya Bernstein

Briefly, while unloading
my mother’s dishwasher
I became one
with the natural cycle
of womanhood, the bending
the removing, the replacing
and again replacing
on the lined shelves
the vessels, the restoring
over and over
to cleanliness, the silent
whirring of renewal, The past wasn’t
perfect, my mother said, but
we have the present,
and the future,
which render, she implied, the past
definitively complete, a finished action.
I wanted so much
to believe her
as I felt the glass in my palms
lose its warmth.

---

Maya Bernstein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in By the Seawall, The Ekphrastic Review, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College and her first collection is There Is No Place Without You (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022). Learn more about her at mayabernstein.com