There's nothing wrong with the twenty-first century that wasn't wrong with the twentieth too

Rabbit, rabbit! Happy New Year! Let's start it off right, with anti-fascism.

My poem "The Watchword" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. It is a ghost poem for Hirsh Glik. I wrote it in July, long before I had any idea I would get to close out the year singing his partisan anthem in memory and summoning of resistance, and I can't even claim it was foreshadowing: I am far from the only person with these ghosts on their mind these days. I would have been glad to sing "Zog nit keyn mol" with A Besere Velt and glad to see this poem in print no matter what. But because of the singing, I think, it means even more than it did when I wrote it. The title comes from a line in the third verse:

ס׳וועט די מאָרגנזון באַגילדן אונדז דעם הײַנט
,און דער נעכטן וועט פֿאַרשווינדן מיט דעם פֿײַנט
—נאָר אויב פֿאַרזאַמען וועט די זון אין דעם קאַיאָר
.ווי אַ פּאַראָל זאָל גיין דאָס ליד פֿון דור צו דור

S'vet di morgnzun bagildn undz dem haynt
un der nekhtn vet farshvindn mitn faynt,
nor oyb farzamen vet di zun in dem kayor—
vi a parol zol geyn dos lid fun dor tsu dor.

The morning sun will gild our today
and yesterday will vanish with its hatred
but if the sun comes slow to dawn—
like a watchword this song must pass from generation to generation.

And it did. It's still sung. It's sung as part of a tradition, and it is sung specifically to remind ourselves and the world that we are here, that we did not walk the last road in 1943 and we are not walking it now—and that we will not let others walk it if we can help it. It's a talisman, a credo, a lookout. It got handed to me and I pass it on.

.מיר זײַנען דאָ

We shared the experience of being alive and then we took some tea

My short story "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass" has been accepted by Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann, edited by Farah Rose Smith (Ulthar Press, June 2019).

I am extraordinarily pleased by this development and not just because it continues to start the year off right. It is the one piece of original fiction I finished in 2018. I wrote it at the beginning of December; it was supposed to be seasonal crack for selkie, but then history got in the way. It features Jewish queerness and demons. Its protagonist is a partisan after the war. In order not to disappear down my usual rabbit hole, I researched the dates of Hanukkah in 1948—which thanks to the interaction of calendars turned out to be partly the dates of Hanukkah in 1949—and then resolutely stayed away from the internet/books. One name is taken from my family history and everything else is invented, so far as I know. The title comes from misremembering a line in Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Devil's Trick," translated and collected in Zlateh the Goat (1966): "The devil licked his singed tail and ran off with his wife to the land where no people walk, no cattle tread, where the sky is copper and the earth is iron." Once I'd gotten it wrong, I kept it. I like my version better for its context anyway.

I am also pleased because while I don't talk about him as much as some other authors, Hoffmann is one of my literary influences who is embarrassingly obvious to me. When my first collection Singing Innocence and Experience (2005) was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, it was gently faulted for "the presence of a few too many earnest young student-artists and musicians obsessed with love or knowledge" and it's true that I wrote all of the stories in college or grad school, but it's also true that Romantic literature. Technically I was first exposed at the age of six when my god-aunt took me to the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker and I imprinted on Drosselmeyer, but I really fell into Hoffmann as a sophomore at Brandeis when the syllabus for Andrew Swensen's "Night, Death, and the Devil" (COML 127a) included, among other forays into the fantastic and the grotesque, "The Golden Pot," and it's not even my favorite of his stories, but it sent me looking for the rest on the spot. I can recognize it now as a commonplace of weird fiction and even of other authors I was reading that semester, but I noticed first with him the idea that sitting down under a tree, glancing up at a window, walking into a bar might take you from the ordinary world into the one where you come out dead or mad or shadowless or married to a beautiful blue-eyed snake and living in the bliss of Atlantis, writing poetry. In the case of the story I placed with this anthology, it's mostly a matter of being around mirrors.

Altogether my reaction to receiving the acceptance was an enthusiastic yell. I'm sure 2019 will contain its share of burning garbage, but I'm really enjoying it so far.