Reading of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, Flying Eastward
       

The airtight interior
                wags in the turbulence as I flip through
a glossy mag, trying to forget
                my body's longing to fall, farther, faster

than leaflets hauled from a hull
                declaring all young men must gather,
Jaffa, May 1948.
                Nahida's father would stash the flyer

she now resurrects for each
                PowerPoint presentation in Cleveland, half
a century away. "Three Days
                in Tel Aviv;' the headline reads, where in "Yafo"

you can "haggle the gruff
                proprietor" of the local "junk shop;'
full of "ancient" castoffs,
                or partake of the bubbling narghileh pipe.

The jet stream shimmies
                the jet, quaking ice in the plastic cup.
O Tel Aviv, "The Bubble"
                in which we live and don't live. O White City.

"Sometimes we feel like
                we're in the mouth," one artist laments,
"of a volcano. Sometimes
                we just want to drink and dance,"

The Israeli artist wants
                to translate everything that's written
on Jaffa's Arab walls
                from the native tongue into a language

"tourists can understand," Today,
                a new post from Nahida, the attached
photos housing the only
                version of her home she will ever

get back. The plane
                jumps in a river of turbulence, the one
we'll leap in once,
                as unnamed flyover cities burn

their lights so far below it seems one breath
                could blow them out.

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Copyright © 2019 Philip Metres All rights reserved
from Returning To Jaffa
Diode Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission