You talk of our wedding like a weekend party:    
the cool yet complex DJ stylings and approving elbow
pulls, without thinking how our families will merge or
whose religion we kick to the curb. Because of your dead
father you want children early, so I keep my trap shut about
the associate professor status I know I could achieve with
ample time and encouragement. For once I don’t think about
the cost. Unlike you, who pulls the topic out like a card trick
among your fellow Jews, cashing in your ethnicity like frequent
flyer miles, based on contingency, not consistency.
Unlike me, with my Medusa curls and eyes the size of chestnuts,
a stockpile of automated responses to questions about the healing
powers of Windex. Not to mention a mother named after a goddess.
You take me to a sadir and I receive scowls from three generations
of relatives after declining a plate of chicken, turning the traditional toast
into a lecture on the Saturday of Lazarus. I meet your ex, who
shares your synagogue and stood next to you shaking hands at
his funeral, some dumb rich girl from the ’burbs with tractor-tire
hips and mosquito bites for boobs. I can’t believe our mouths have
been the same places. A few months later a second encounter:
she notices I do my cross before picking apart my pad thai
and takes you outside the restaurant to tell, not ask, in a tone
polished and patronizing after so many sociology courses
from your lavish liberal New England education, I must be pro-life
because I’m Christian.

Amanda Halkiotis is a poet, theater critic, and executive assistant who always wanted to move to New York and call it her home. She finally does, and when the weather behaves walks home over the Brooklyn Bridge from her office in Tribeca.

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Keywords : Religion, Marriage, Abortion

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