The Need
don’t hate your neighbor in your heart
says the bumpersticker almost
backing into me half plea half joke
in our LA traffic
i park and hear my neighbor
warming up his vintage car in the driveway
and it sounds like warplanes
and news and noise
become one
“i need
to warm up the engine man
i neeeed to” he keeps repeating to me
as I bolt over ready to pop
that was my first
day of the war in Ukraine —
frantically texting my parents, cousins, old friends
reading bumper stickers street signs billboards as augury
pacing and driving endlessly through our little neighborhood
where every few feet the sidewalk tiles burst upward
from tree roots that won’t stay down
where I never managed to buy a home
like my neighbor did or even a car like the one he’s got
where I’m a self-delusional refugee with unaffordable rent
did I need to settle here inside a river of my need to prove something next door to his clogged carburetor need yes I guess I neeeeeded it
well a month into the war I saw eight cops
on the neighbor’s porch
turned out he’s been stealing millions worth of loot
from Hollywood celebrities
who live two neighborhoods over
he was posing as a posh real estate
agent guess that’s how he bought his jaguar
to grow up squinting at all this wealth—
stumbling over the popping roots
that’s a vintage kind of envy a Biblical kind of hatred a real neeeeeed
I’m not looking for who to blame for this second-
hand blur of the war I’m looking
at the news at my shaking hands
the agency—
not in the heart not in the heart not in the heart
where is it
if not in the heart?
Listen to Jake Marmer read “The Need”:
Third Generation
forgiveness doesn’t begin
to congeal into a word—
the dead are the dead and those
who suffered through their deaths
are now gone too
and reverberations
of their rupture
are inseparable from my life’s contours
I wouldn’t know or begin
to imagine another self—
so then what is forgiveness
and what have I got to do with it?
I didn’t teach my children
Russian
or Ukrainian
languages that no longer belong in the same line
yet even that doesn’t change anything
for though I know there had been
the righteous
and those who cried
for us in their helplessness
I also know who—
and that it was no accident or abnormality
but the unfolding of circumstances within
their inevitable centuries-old groove
I know it the way I know my name—
all of my names –
including the Russian
one I’ve discarded
and now consider to be a kind
of vaccine, a shot of death
in the arm of personal diasporist psycho-history
fuck them with their Gogol and Dostoyevsky
I say but are they not rooted in me far deeper
than Torah than Talmud?
As if English filling my mouth
today is any better, purer?
If Jews chose to erase
themselves out of peculiarity
out of ethnicity
a stream giving way into a river
I would swim in it
If I knew the Talmud
would go unread, unheeded
would I feel broken? I know I wouldn’t
change anything
about my life
most days it all has so little to do
with the grip
of the invisible fingers on my lungs
holding harder
every year, stretching harder
into the past
into what you might call
“details”
of what had occurred
to those I
come from
“details”
opening
to me
as if saying: you’re now
ready to receive
and this is the reason
why there will never
be another
kind of sacred
a black hole a dark river a dark knowing
in which purification, forgiveness, self
all flow as one
flow like venom
Listen to Jake Marmer read “Third Generation”:
