The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay (Fernwood Press, 2025).

The Voice of God

In the first grade I kneel behind a trash can heaped with crepe-paper flames. The branches shudder. I am God’s voice. I am God’s call for burnt offerings, the scent of smoking flesh. Mount Moriah unspools its summit road down the middle of the reading rug, Abraham climbs, leading God’s burnt offering by the hand. The span between the knife and Isaac’s chest is a form of closeness. The ram like an afterthought—enough testing now, let us eat. My father shudders in the small attic room of his sickness. My father stamps on the voices in his head, but they keep burning. Soon he will come downstairs. The angel will not stay his hand.

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.