Assistant Editor Lily Meyer: In “The Runners,” Natan Last takes the reader on a run through Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn. His speaker, Jewish but secular, feels an instinctive unease that he swiftly connects to his deep discomfort with gentrification, Israeli settlements in Palestinian neighborhoods, and other forms of unwelcome and imposed presence. Last mixes in Greek mythology and The Wizard of Oz, reminding us that no one person and no one culture can exist in a vacuum. We influence each other, like it or not.
To hear Natan reading his poem, click below:
The Runners
is what the Community Board called us, gentrifiers
returned to our city but not the neighborhoods we grew up in,
its penitent cribs, its open-air prison of Polaroids, runners
because we jogged, leather strapping our dominant arms, my right
arm, plastic cradles for iPhones, playlist like a prayer in black
phylactery for the ten miles it takes to circle Bed-Stuy or Crown
Heights, I try to move my feet in a Dorothy-ish right of return,
I flatten my arches, I click, I compose jokes about cross-
country kids from Iowa, I hush up about all those Greek myths,
Hermes the psychopomp toting a notice to evict in his toga,
Atalanta zoned for wildness, a right to sojourn & spurn her father & decide
to stay unmarried, outrun potential suitors, condemn the men to die like old housing.
Hermes who flits between realms, like a mind
& its shiny polysemic passport, runners but transitive, run
the meeting, bake sale, phone bank, West Midwood street cleanup, protest
against inclusionary zoning—my brain stem an open checkpoint—runners
like the grim slicing sides of a sled, erasable borders
traced on a snowed hill by Picnic House in the park.
Home again, visiting my father, I jog, my mother
in Israel as Sheikh Jarrah evictions run more or less
as intended, I run the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, I see
a kippahed boy about ten climb atop a jeep as if inciting
a pocket riot, a girl in one of those long dresses riding a pink tricycle, her
father staring at me as I jog, she’s blocking the sidewalk, will I
let them control the space, I tense my right arm,
my pitching arm, the arm I use to make a point.
Once, I asked a friend of mine who grew up Orthodox
was it rude to run shirtless in South Williamsburg, not that
I had a godly physique like Hermes, but it was theirs,
the neighborhood, more or less, & I felt like an oversexed invader.
They won’t even let me sit next to them on planes, she said,
she’d gone the way of Atalanta, to live on her own & not
brook the rules of her father, & I thought of airplanes then
as group phylacteries, flying metal prisms & prayers crumpled inside,
air traffic controllers davening on runways, their neon flags
of semaphore like a racer’s baton, or else like Dorothy’s ruby slippers,
frantic in antanaclasis as they move their hands like feet, like iambs:
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,
there is no place, like home.
Natan Last works in economic policy and migration advocacy. He also writes crossword puzzles for the New Yorker and the New York Times. His essays and poems appear in The Atlantic, Narrative, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Money on the Left.
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