I don’t know much about Jerusalem
besides my walks in it. I know my wife’s
Jewish parents are scared to visit,
and I know a Muslim mother
begs with her legless son
whose stubs dangle from his wheelchair
on the patinaed steps inside Damascus Gate.
Though I may be mistaking them
for the duo at Qalandiya checkpoint,
putting out their upturned hands
for Janice and Rob who won’t visit,
won’t fill those hands with a few
shekels, won’t sit thigh
to thigh with Arabs in serveeses
to meet their daughter and me
at a literary festival where we wait two hours
for Taha Muhammad Ali
to take the stage, but it doesn’t happen,
and the half-British son of an aristocrat,
trying to cauterize the bleeding
coming from the spurned audience,
ekes out a composed apology
for the poet, who probably never left his home
in Nasra, who was probably watching TV.

We’re told he’s eccentric, but to the crowd
it isn’t charming, nor to Janice and Rob
for whom the no-show might’ve confirmed
something about me, my unreliability,
my lower-class lack of respect for people’s
time. Or this probably isn’t fair of me,
to anybody, because in ten years,
in December in Pittsburgh,
after spending a month between a hotel
and their dark brick house across from the car museum
while their youngest daughter is in hospice,
I’ll prove their theoretical suspicions true
when, for my own eccentric reasons,
I’m a no-show at her funeral,
where the rabbi pronounces the name
of the city I don’t know so well,
but which means so much to me,
Yerushalayim.

 

 

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Edward Salem is the author of Intifadas (Sarabande) and Monk Fruit (Nightboat). His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Granta, New York Review of Books, Poetry, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash