This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay (Fernwood Press, 2025).
How to Build an Altar
Leave it room
to breathe. Tender
the tinder bed, snap twigs
to kindling, strike awake the wick.
Bracken, bramble, imagine the wood
with a fire in its heart. Animals
flee with their mouths open—
a son, bound as eggshell
binds a yolk whole and golden,
unafraid. A father may slake
his knife, but a son can still live
if he imagines the broken branches
whole again, lets the timbers
turn back into trees.
Ayelet Amittay is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon. Her first book, The Eating Knife, was published in April 2025. Her chapbook, Therapy Room, won second place in the 2024 International 3-Day Chapbook Competition and was published by Harvard Square Press. Ayelet’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Rattle, and others. She was a Yetzirah scholar in 2025. She runs a private psychiatric practice, Wild Geese Mental Health, and serves as an instructor for the Touchstone Institute. 
Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.
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