FENCEPOSTS OF HISTORY, REPEATING
Confined to the car, I’m back-
road infiltrating the town
that PR spin for my grad
school declares as its locale,
but, loyal to fiction, its postal
address is faux. This village
of deceiving appearances (my mother
remembers to warn me post-
graduation), once renowned
for its oversized posted
welcome sign:
No Jews—
despite good fortune post-
modernly and currently there planted
by Jewish mothers fled from out-
door privy-limited, tenemented
ancestors surfaced from steerage post-
abandonment of Busk, Lodz, and farms
of the Pale. Bordering this hamlet—
moated from Semitic “infection,” broadsides
of the day diagnosed—poses
a city deemed safer, though I lived
and wrote and read and slept
there amid ricocheted bullets, discarded
cats gone feral, tossed syringes, spent
condoms leaking acrid puddles in the brown-
grassed park, and hourly car alarm
refrains, a descant to strains
of bathroom marriage-
breakup fights and kitchen plate-
smashing in barred-window
apartment blocks yearly repainted,
yet off-gassing VOCs of shtetls,
where hopes-of-the-future moaned
failed-to-flush toilets, bounced checks, and exiled
scraps of poetry. No sign,
in this day, prevents ingress
(or flight), no paltry-audience complaints
from poets inured to basement stages, no
tax on paper, no embargo of ink, no sword
through haystacks hiding Jewish children,
no checkpoint for identities—save
the library door you swing closed to wrack
the silence, so they will know you
are here and have planted the stacks
with the soil of your secure country:
the imagination, which could wisp
past the sentries, occupiers, pillagers,
and their singing missiles which remind
you: you are always
on the outs with a word
shaped like a promise.