Running: A Poem

David Karpel tells an American story of persecution and flight: a family that can’t stop running.

Cameron Conaway’s Note: David Karpel has achieved something spectacular in this poem. Within taut, muscular lines, he has traced the roots of his fight back until reality becomes blurred to where he’s from, “I come from the mythological.” Along the way we ride “crumbling,” of a sea wall and a Holocaust, of relationships and shaken faith, of histories and food and ideas and memory and even societal breakdowns that confirm prejudice. Let not the crumbling be confused for weakness. This mini-world Karpel envisions has an infinite reach and an infinite willingness to reach, and it’s all taking place in a warrior atmosphere where even the “tangy salt smell” of the Biscayne Bay “wears the pungent chainmail / of ancient crusted fish scales.” The fight here is one rooted firmly in the present and leaning toward the future, yet simultaneously weighed down and invigorated by “the from / that is now.”

Running: An Inherently Incomplete Mural Due to Requisite Blurring

By David Karpel

I.

I am from

the barrel of a gun,

always on the run.

I am from neon lit cortaditos

of steaming Bustelo

standing on 11th and Collins.

I am from the sea wall

crumbling under the incessant

embrace of Biscayne Bay

whose tangy salt smell

wears the pungent chainmail

of ancient crusted fish scales.

I am from climbing

for sweet navel oranges,

from picking the kumquat tree—

walnut-sized cherry bombs of bitterness

we’d peg at each other

hard enough to leave ovular welts.

II.

I’m from Cuban sandwiches

and papitas fritas and flan,

cacophonous Shabbos dinners

and persistent Juban guilt.

I’m from Babbe and Abuela

and Zeide and Abuelo

and tíos and tias and cousins everywhere;

and stores and stores

of cualquiera merchandise,

and Levis 501 button down jeans for miles.

I’m from eating too much,

from “You’re part of a long line of merchants,”

and “Is she Jewish?”

I am from a godless Holocaust Zionism

reshaped, reformulated, and reconstructed

into deep observance of true irrational faith.

I’m from antediluvian desert winds

blown far to Russia, Rumania, Poland,

across the Atlantic to Havana,

Brooklyn, Queens, and Miami Beach;

from ginger-rich chicken soup, picadillo,

platanitos, palomilla, and matzo meal latkes

you dip in refined sugar like you do

your memory.

III.

From the running from pogroms.

From the running from communism.

From the running from victimhood.

From Mom and Dad whose movie

has unraveled

now that divorce

in their late 60s has come

in the land of the free

markets and rights to bear arms.

From Mom running from the threat of a gun

in a Bal Harbour parking lot,

only yards between her

and two young black

assailants demanding her keys

“and get in the car”

and instead getting her purse

and confirming her prejudice.

From Dad running from the threat of a gun

across the corporate brown table

and never having stopped running

from confrontation

except from Mom.

From Tío Al running from the threat of a gun

and holding one of his own

moving from house to house

in a Cuba gone crazy

for those who refused.

I’m from the mythological,

from riding Dad’s bike on the Malecon,

hitching rides on buses;

and from the white suit Zeide Wolf cut

for the cigar chewing, Panama hat wearing

tough guy mayor of some Cuban town

I can’t ask him the name of anymore.

I am from banker boxes stored in a closet—

which used to also store my father’s gun—

in my mother’s out-of-state apartment

which tell me the wordless story

of where I’m supposed to be from,

but not in one is the story

explaining the from

that is now and the now

still to come.

 

Read more in Cameron Conaway’s series, “What’s Your Fight?” on The Good Life.

Image credit: heather0714/Flickr