the more i learn, the more i learn
i don’t know what the fuck
i’m talking about. someone
who doesn’t care a fig for poetry
might think i knew a lot
yet in most bookshops i’m lost,
shelves heavy with the bodies
of forgotten writers. it’s relative.
a president can say audacity or
a president can say sad & both eat
the slow-cured meat of empire.
when i say i carry my people
inside me i don’t mean a country.
the star that hangs from my neck
is simply a way of saying israel
is not a physical place but can be
written down & carried anywhere.
it says my people are most beautiful
when moving, when movement,
when our only state is the liquid
state of water, is adapting to our container.
homeland sometimes just means
what books you’ve read, what stories
you spread with your sneakers.
my people, any place you live
long enough to build bombs
is a place you’ve lived too long—
it’s relative. my friends, the only
thing i know for sure is the missiles
on television are only beautiful
if you’ve never known suffering.
my friends, the only country i will ever
pledge my allegiance to
is your music, is under investigation
for treason.
______________________________
Excerpted from Pig by Sam Sax. Copyright © 2023 by Sam Sax. Reprinted with Permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This poem previously appeared in the American Poetry Review.
Sam Sax
Sam Sax is a queer, jewish poet, and educator. He's the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017) winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & the MacDowell Colony. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, winner of the Gulf Coast Prize, The Iowa Review Award, & American Literary Award. His poems have appeared in BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry Magazine and other journals. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press and will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University this Fall.
