The Brooklyn Rail

We were at school, eternal assembly
bell after bell, while parents of classmates,
relatives on the wrong plane, became chemical
smoke, terrible snow in September.

Rubble dusting Tribeca, pets dropping dead
—sometimes I ask new friends, where were you?
And think of my brother driving from one bridge
to the next, barricaded, tunnel after tunnel,

desperate to retrieve me. Screens replaying
the collapse. Could schoolrooms prepare us for
not the war on freedom or the war
that traded blood for oil but the acts

coming one after the other, an epic
theater of American proportion—Patriot,
Homeland, Safe Port—mosques on fire,
angels holding vigil in the streets.

Every chain link fence was an obituary.
Wasn’t there always a war? Weren’t we
initiated? Children of the city of cities,
girls with their head scarves torn off,

teens tossing if you see Something say
Something around like a hacky sack.
Newest catchphrase, widespread
warrantless surveillance. Hundreds

of thousands detained, followed home,
and into holy houses. Bodegas raided
and boarded up. Where were you when
terror was the remedy for terror, when

the spin cycle started and never stopped
—wasn’t there always a war? On this land
is your land, song like a pumpkin carved
empty and left out to rot.

Isn’t there always a building falling
whether or not I witness it, pay
for it—am I an American? I wanted this
to be an Ars Poetica, my first.

My formative years spent walking around
ground zero—the site and fact of it—nascent
with nothingness. I was born and born again
in a futureless country, burgeoning

with scapegoats, sacrifices, sanitized
words for violence. Even then, I was tired
of seeing beauty in the world, in words,
sleep-writing my way out of nationalist dreams.

Of students, breaching bolted doors, flowing out
into the street, into a river of hundreds of thousands
chanting in unison, confined in cages.
How many of us immigrants

troubling the erotic edge of exile? A refugee once
and always, notarized forms nestled with my childhood
braid and handkerchief in the same chest.
Everyone I grew up with—still sick with it

—sanctified by metal detectors, sweating out
bomb threats, shootings, and angel dust.
Getting drunk in stairwells after gym class,
chasing each other from train car to train car.

So much acid, so much saying nothing, so
much Smirnoff Minute Maid Poland Spring bottle.
Whole days disappearing. Manic Panic stained
bath tubs, Tompkins Square mosh pit, secret

sexual codes of multi-colored jelly bracelets
making national headlines.
I used to think these stories were separate.
I went to middle school with this boy who sold pills,

scratched his name into shit. Back then
he was green-haired and mean.
Ten years later, on the cover of the NYT—
he looked the same “Butcher of Brighton Beach,

deranged drug-lord on a stabbing spree.“
It was Valentine’s day, 2011,
all year the radios flooded with outrage
over an Islamic Faith Center planned for lower Manhattan.

Chelsea Manning was facing life
for the Guantanamo Files.
Obama’s sent 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan,
I’d stopped listening to the news

and there it was—a fragment of my history—
the Bay Ridge train tracks like the back of his hands,
the derelict beauty of his stomping grounds,
the footprints he left in the snow,

the crawl space where he wrote his name
beside the name of a woman he murdered
again and again, accompanied each time
by the shape of a heart.

In interviews, he said after you kill one person, it gets easier.
I was living in Oregon then. Behind an elementary school
stage curtain, I helped parents apply for food stamps,
bill assistance, safe housing. The recession

did not recede the troops, the military bases,
the Zionist manifesto. My neighbor collected
Cadillac hearses. They lined our narrow street, coffin-less.

At night, the Cadillacs teemed with cats—a writhing
clutch that dispersed every morning and pissed
on our porch swing. At the crack of dawn,
my roommates rode out to open Starbucks.

Living the immigrant dream
I woke to a pear tree I did not plant,
surrounded by wasted fruit
turned black in the sun.