Embedded Files
akedah 1: kashrut
no stunner just
a knife & terror
error message
in the jugular
impossible compression
& then – on fire –
the altar
akedah 2: brisket
my mother hefted my father’s weights
otherwise unused to press the brisket
hidden deep in the understairs closet
where coats hang on ghosts packed close
for the morning rush and wrestle in the car
to school we listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland
until the magnetic tape wears thin and Side Two\s
ending echoes backwards a fingerprint whose
disappearing as if from breath-steaming glass
the grease we leave reading HELP ME PLS
there’s a connection equinox-thin between me now
& who I was as a kid shorn of the ram’s horn
which resounds because it’s cut dead
bone from the beheaded
sacrifice Bereishit 21:1–22:4 the parsha
read on Rosh Hashana head of year
& called the akedah which means binding
you’ll remember a child tied to stone
the closed loop logic not of sacrifice
metal scent of terror pleasing to whatever
or even brutal substitution but total submission
unforgiveable even under whatever pressure
because it’s god’s will too that the rope’s untied with
– what? a father’s shaking fingers
that loop it tight around the convenient ram
hemp stiff amid wild fleece leaving lanolin
the child longs to plunge wrist-deep into
cradling in the circle of his fingers
one scored wrist & you just know that the patriarch
made the kid schlep the meat and fat and bone
down the mountain while he twirled his fine horn
the child stumbling over fear tangled into
gratitude locked in he eats the meat he carried
& could have been & now is him
does he cry silently as I did, every mitten snot-
frosted until – however strung – it’s lost
disgust & fingers plunged in snow red-raw to soothe
the strop of the nickless blade
the animal’s thick coat scraped clean
to leave behind a hide
on which the Torah can be written errorless
& bound with its golden cord
to be read round & round the year that always
starts with yes the word is
slaughter
akedah 3: bleeding
don’t trust an animal that bleeds
for a week & lives said which comedian
Aristotle (badoomdoom) loved a double
entendre he could have said keep ur friends
close but your endometrium closer
at eleven i’m so used to a crust
of blood on my inner thighs I
don’t notice the first one the eternal
question in a house of siblings: who
started it? & for years the complex
unconscious relief each time deniability
plausible as long as I’m unknocked up
animal self called dumb alright
no theory of mind no speech
no grief
akedah 4: daughter
the altar
becomes her
becoming deer
to no-one
nor isthmus
nor war is
excuse to lose
footing
& – splash –
go under
akedah 5: haruspex
doctor doctor, what does it mean
to dream every night of intestines
that depends, my dear, on a scale of one
to ten can you tell me how severed
are they? do they slip through
your little fingers leaving you
on red? is the shit smell uncleansable
from nostrils when you wake
in the pre-dawn dark & count your
pulse? once, a doctor stuck an oxi-
meter on my finger & said incident-
ally something about my father
& my pulse shot into the red zone.
light-headed, I said see & she said
I am a specialist in allergies. take
these. in her hand two tablets.
familiar scene. I’d rather dream
in entrails than go numb obeying
law. blood from a stone. to be gutted
means, colloquially, upset; dis-
appointment. here, have mine. a rope’s
a rope & look, a sign: kids go free.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), and their collection of speculative (non)fiction Truth & Dare (Cipher Press, 2023) was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story Prizes. Their poetry has appeared on Dublin billboards and translated into Japanese and Greek, and in various magazines and anthologies. Their most recent poetry project is a collaborative zine with Sarah Crewe, The God File: Yentling (Broygas Edition) (Loose Associations, 2024), raising money for Palestinian writers via PEN Emergency Fund for Writers at Risk. So works for Burley Fisher Books and the Maktaba at Ibraaz, and is the editor of catflap, the magazine of Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast.
Copyright © 2026 by So Mayer, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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