Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I returned home to Philly for my birthday this year. I planned a breakfast with my father and dinner with my brother. Both plans were thwarted. My dampened mood raised when I opened the curtains the next morning. I booked my hotel across the street from the Free Library of Philadelphia on Logan Circle.

It was a second home to me. I spent many early evenings after school in its stacks and long, softly lit wooden tables. The neoclassical building made reading and studying a stately enterprise. As a treat to myself, I walked Franklin Parkway, then stopped to marvel at its columns and marble. Thinking about my precarious youth, I realized I spent those many hours reading to calm my unsettled disposition, to journey in my mind where I was not supposed to travel, both inward and away.

The taxi driver on the ride in from the airport asked me if I missed Philadelphia. I said, actually, I do. He said, too much crime. Do you return often? I said, Not nearly enough.

To borrow a phrase, love calls us to the things of this world. But as today’s brilliant poem reminds us, in our search for happiness, we find our worth in relation to our freedom and societal expectations. We learn to self-affirm in our search for joy.

Eureka!
by Jessica Abughattas

My name is my own my own my own.
—June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights”

Here in the decomposed granite
and desertscape, a frontier town
on the horizon for me and the old

west iconography I carry 
like a tissue or an old receipt.
I’m damned by the land

I love. I’m the one
doing the damning.
I’m no friend of oblivion anymore.

Every day, I wake up and feel deeply
flawed. For these, I have room
in my life: a standup comedian, a poet,

a painter, a passionate kisser, women
sitting in cafés alone
disrupting equilibrium.

Here, homes are made
of wood and stucco. But back home, 
they’re stone. A big dark beautiful eye. An eye

that looks like mine.
I’m Palestinian, so I love
to consolidate. The remaining son.

This objectivity avoids
metaphor, can only be what it is.
My prayer:

May all living things
be happy one day.
But let them take their time. 

Let them be bad
in the in-between and suffer
no consequences for it.

My prayer: My friend, 
I hope your lover isn’t a sadist
sitting in bars in public, telling strangers

You’re about to meet your soulmate.
No, no, you’re afraid 
of being free.

When I go back
to my unhappiness, I’m sure
to cook it a meal. My sin?

I care about myself
without being kind to myself.
They wanted me, they wanted

me only to idle 
around idolatry like a girl
in a mall. And if it’s out there

I’m going to find it. Like hair
wrapped in a drain.
Affairs never approach

this grizzly reality.
Dirt is ugly,
but mountains?

If you love where you’re from
god help you stay there.
Here in the heat

is where I need to be.
This world is frightening;
I’m trying to enjoy it.

“Eureka!” by Jessica Abughattas. Used by permission of the poet.