By Jeremy Nathan Marks
PROMPT — Despite ...
My world is in autumn. The sky turns sallow, and trees drop their chupahs.
It is spring elsewhere: Asunción, Buenos Aires, La Paz, cities with Nazi legacies. Just like Foggy Bottom and Langley where they store their jacarandas indoors.
No, this isn’t comedy; it’s hardly the Commedia dell’arte Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder fashioned for Broadway. Kenneth Mars shall not appear from behind the Tropic of Capricorn.
*
Up here, at my border, a U.S. Customs official corrects me when I say to his “Citizenship?” “American.”
“It’s United States of America,” he says.
No. I insist I will plant the flag of all of us from Utqiagvik (Barrow) to Tierra del Fuego whether the suits at State like it or not. Though, try as I might, I can’t prevent the bits of Bush and Ben Gurion in my blood from commandeering my intentions.
I still think I can make the crooked places straight.
*
I have not made the Sabbath officially holy for many seasons. I pray as far from Jerusalem as Mecca. Hebrew is a language I read without knowing; I speak just a handful of Arabic greetings.
In my prayers, God’s face is hairless. They are as much a Gaza widow as a Re’im orphan as a Mapuche or some Pennsylvania Dutch.
The world has become a bell clanging in my ears: tinnitus, the detritus of my SSRI. What will it take to make that bell into a bellbird, to search for “brakes of the cedar and sycamore bowers” where “Struggles the light that is love to the flowers?”
In my search for an archway of peace—La Portada—again I meet my Customs official.
"Citizenship?" He says.
"Cuckoo," I reply.
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. His latest books is Flint River (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). New work can be found in Rattle, Belt Magazine, Terrain.org, New Verse News, Mobius, Topical Poetry, and Writers Resist.
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