That’s the title of my favorite poem from a new online poetry journal The Blue Jew Yorker. It’s written by BJY’s publisher Adam Shechter, and it begins with the line

No matter how much I rest this flesh/It awakens nervous

Story of my life, dude. It’s so validating when a poem resonates with what you thought was your own lonely predawn neurotic frequency.

More juicy reading can be found in “Hayei Olam (Mishberach)” by the always astounding Jake Marmer, who’s also the managing editor of another Jewish poetry/art journal Mima’amakim, Rachel Eagle Reiter’s angry diatribe at a Christian world “Jewess in Starbuck’s,” and David Druce’s “American Jew.” The subject of exile mirrors the experience of most Jews in “Torah in Conversation,” although the NY-centric vibe of the journal may cause even deeper feelings of isolation in those nowhere near this tight-knit Jewish world. But it is called the Blue Jew Yorker, after all. If I wanna read about my kind of exile, I should write more of my own poetry.

More “poems of survival and ecstasy” in New York and Jewish essays here.