Impossible Belonging

“Wrong was everything,” opens the poem “Karina’s Virus” in Maya Pindyck’s third collection, Impossible Belonging. The poem progresses: “The backyard / broke its starlings,” and, later, “A girl / this morning made a book / about the courage it takes / not to anger a bee.” In “Photograph,” the speaker recalls her early conception of feminism, shaped by an idealized photograph of her Israeli mother as “a short-haired soldier dressed in khaki, / aiming her rifle at some imaginary / terrorist,” for

Girl power meant flexing the nation’s bicep
to prove its dream of equality.
I can do anything.
Kill anyone.

Now a mother herself, the speaker is caught between the visceral pull of “belonging” and its ties to violence. She reflects on her C-section—“how futile / any attempt to stitch back / a body cut open / for love’s necessary tear”—and wrestles with her own complex connections to familial homelands across generations:

The heart: old tugboat,
its motor sore & somewhere

a sail
pulling me back to where

we wailed:
Egypt, Syria, 

Syria, “a country / I am not allowed to visit,” and the homeland of her maternal grandfather who migrated to Palestine. Her maternal grandmother left her family behind in Poland:

My other family never made it.

I once walked a field
covering their bodies. Wildflowers

& grasses. Here, the story of a line
of children shot in the schoolyard.

The speaker tries to imagine the future of the boy “playing ball / by the hole where they hid — / how he ratted them out to a soldier.”

Despite a mother who begs: “Promise me you won’t write another poem / bashing my home,” these poems assert their independence by addressing shifting systems of power, whether Pindyck—who was raised in both Boston and Tel Aviv—is interrogating white privilege in the United States or anti-Arab sentiments in Israel (as in “To the Israeli Woman Who Worried Her Daughter’s Doll Spoke Arabic”). When it comes to motherhood, the speaker defies “four white women” who tell her to bury the placenta, which she instead burns. “Measuring Unruly Distances” concludes:

Standing between this unit of arms
& inches of language, I see my daughter
—her pluming

a bloom
I can’t count on.