The number 7 bus drops me off
in the hood, next to a low stone wall
I see Amos
and can’t believe he is still alive.
His white eyes scored with bloody capillaries,
rolling like Ferris wheels lit up with fluorescents
in Satan’s amusement park, he tells us—
there is nothing in the world that can kill me, I am
God.
When he was a boy he would
wander the city with his father
and sell shoes
Rolstars and Adidos
on a wooden cart with car wheels.
He was with him
when somebody put a bullet between
his eyes. When he began to shoot up
they stopped calling him
Amos the retard
and started to call him
Amos the addict.
Either way
for a long time I had thought he was of
blessed memory.
Pasolini is on his way to Haifa
and I’m actually thinking about what Yoko,
my dog’s heart looks like. It sounds as if
the train conductor is announcing his death. In Binyamina,
changing trains, on the bench
three smokers,
on my right a model policeman who was overgenerous with aftershave
on my left a girl connected to her headset
speaking Dutch,
the train tracks are the endless veins
in Amos’ arms.
Yesterday they burned a church in Tiberias
and I am thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini
(what over-the-top names these Italians have)
and his words confuse me because of the stinky
shwarma that the pensioner with a doobon coat is wolfing down
In the seat across from me,
a young woman soldier tells another soldier “Nadav
was a strict commander but he had a good heart.”
And I think about what
Nadav’s heart looks like and what Yoko’s heart looks like and somehow I
tell myself out loud—
when I have a little extra money
I will exchange my rotting teeth
for sparkling gold, it’s not modest
on my part to be modest, I never
found anything romantic
in being poor. As a child I dreamed
of a sparkling champagne waterfall
in a gold cup of The Notorious B.I.G
that in his childhood dreamt about the limousine of Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D.
Since then I’ve loved gold and never understood why
people leave their home to listen to poetry,
just as I never understood people who don’t have a television at home
or people who have time to read novels.
Pier fucking Paolo mother fucker Pasolini
I am in Haifa,
reading poems on the patio of a
coffee shop in the Hadar neighborhood
and thinking about people leaving their homes to listen to poetry
and about those who gave those sparkling
names to all these places that look like my teeth,
like an opulent project in Hadera
where the neglect is the only thing that can be considered
opulent. I swear that
I saw the local Amos
sitting on a stone wall across from me
rolling his dead eyes, I swear
I didn’t mean to drink and I returned
drunk on the last train. Before midnight,
the forest already
dark, Pasolini got lost
on the way to Haifa,
Does it matter who murdered him? Now
I don’t have any way to get home,
so I go to the road and try
to stop cars with my extended finger,
the pensioner’s doobon played in my mind
until I was swallowed up by a Honda Civic.
The driver asks “Where to?”
I answer “to the city.”
He says “Hadera
is everything, just not a city, it’s more
like a giant cemetery.”
And ever since I’ve changed my mind
about cemeteries.
Please note that in the printed version of this poem, which appears in Winter 2019, the poem’s translator, Michele R. Nevo, was mistakenly omitted from the credits. We are sincerely sorry for this error as Nevo, clearly, is integral to what we consider the poem’s success.