Siblings
An early memory: My brother and I sit side by side, legs outstretched. I try to move my leg up and down, but it doesn’t budge. I am determined, try again, but my leg remains still. Suddenly I realize I’ve been looking not at my own limbs, but at my brother’s. Yet something unsettling persists past this clarification—why can’t my mind move him? That my brother and I are not the same person is a lesson I have only partially learned. At times, this is a tremendous frustration; at others, an impossible thrill. “Extreme familiarity with extreme strangeness,” writes Hélène Cixous, thinking of dreams, but she might as well have been reflecting on the uncanny experience of siblinghood.
Andrea Cohen’s “Siblings” deftly enacts this distinctive knot of intimacy and distance. The poem is small, and when I first came across it, I encountered it not in order, but like an image, all at once: In a single glance, I took in its thin form stacked atop the final, set-apart line: “one roof.” The surreal quality of that initial brush—that image of a house teetering upside down—inflects my subsequent linear readings. Now when I read the poem, meeting its contradictory meaning, I’m aware that as I descend through the brief text, I am also ascending. What awaits is not a pure root, but something stranger. Both subterranean and otherworldly, the sibling is childhood’s impossible return, askew—the realization of an impossible dream, a peculiar density that, like language itself, differentiates as it shares, a hazy trace of where the self ends.
— Claire Schwartz
Listen to Andrea Cohen read "Siblings."
Siblings
We lived in many houses beneath one roof.
I’m Arielle Angel, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.
We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.
If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments (2024). A new poetry collection, Sugar, will be out in early 2026.
