Therapy Room
THERAPY ROOM
by Ayelet Amittay
* 2nd Place, 2023 International 3-Day Poetry Chapbook Contest
Ayelet
Amittay’s Therapy Room allows us into
a room made to hold minds. In this room there are no plants but a flower; it is
green and on a cup. There is no music but a score, framed and hanging on one of
four walls. Yet the painting of a moon is strong enough to pull at the ocean always
at the edge of the poet’s mind. Within these four walls, during 50-minute
sessions, what is most concrete is time and its passing—specifically “the
passing of my time with you.” The particular mind of this poet allows us to
“hear the listening” and see the space where one risks “everything for you to
see me.” Outside and beyond this space are trees, a river, Trump signs on the
way to the coast, real flowers (“the brittle braille of Queen Anne’s Lace,”
both seen and felt), “the bloodsucking nature of my longing,” and the ocean.
Within the short space of these 12 poems, Ayelet Amittay makes us believe that
while nothing can be beheld all at once, it can be beheld.