Second Coming No. 101 — April 30, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Josh Jacobs
For Mark Odesskiy, Aspiring US Citizen
In middle-school Civics in the 80s I learned
four score and seven wasn’t that long ago;
we counted, democracy still needed us;
plus Checks and Balances, and Russia is Bad.
At 28 I tutored Mark Odesskiy,
his name a catalog of history’s
blows: of Ukraine, raised in Moscow, exiled
again in Jersey City’s Jewish Home.
He wanted to become a citizen
at three score and ten. The Soviet Union
had fallen and the Constitution seemed
to glow unquestioned, history at an end.
But Mark, bemused, talked through Amendments, saw
a system that could change again, even
to let someone like him inside to add
his worn shirt and tallis to our tapestry.
I said goodbye, left town, and history
resumed: two buildings fell, my brother one
footnote between the Twin and Freedom Towers;
at least five distant wars; Russia returned,
its oil and gold now freed of any taint,
as of last month when our new broligarchs
publicly scrubbed Ukraine from history,
our pledges pulled down like statues in a coup.
Inside my hunkered place I look up Mark’s
children, in real estate; I join them now
in the terrible, beautiful reweaving
that must work beneath the statues to lift this land.
Josh Jacobs’s poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Pangyrus, Stone Circle Review, Verklempt, and other journals. He won the 2023 Common Ground Review Poetry Prize, selected by Oliver de la Paz, and was a participant in the 2024 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference. Jacobs works at MIT and lives near Boston.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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I love the flow and the scope of this. Wonderful work.