Nine dollars for a quarter pound of smoked salmon, you got to be kidding me.
What’s a poor Jew to do?
Become a brown bear in Alaska
who has mastered the art of curing the fish, wears a kippa on Saturdays
no matter what the other grizzlies think?
Naw. I don’t think so.

I mean, how do you say Baruch Atah Adonai in grizzly language?
It’s too difficult for a dumb schmuck like me to figure out.
Even if I did,
what would my God think?

Then it occurs to me, God never put lox into the Torah.
That’s an assimilation dance my grandma Shirley,
of Brighton Beach,
figured out post-Depression,
the Bible shoved under the bed
where she thought God couldn’t see.

God could see and look, the price we pay--
lox at forty dollars a pound,
five dollar a bagel.
It’s blasphemy.

I’ll tell you what blasphemy is—that my wife walks to the temple
and I sit at home and watch college football
while my kid draws porcupines on the kitchen wall
with pork encased crayons.

I can’t figure any of this religious shit out. It used to be
Sunday morning brunch with a pound a nova. That’s how I prayed.
Now, I can’t even pay the phone bill. Hell with it.

I pick up the dial tone-less receiver and call, Shirley.
Bubbie, I say.
any chance you can hook me up with a half pound
of belly lox for the weekend?
But she’s dead
and I can’t tell if the voice I hear in my ear
is her fleshy baritone
or the old Jewish guy upstairs
who shows me the numbers etched into his arms
then gives me that look.
What? I say. What?