Aimee Pozorski
Allied Forces
We stand before a door that,
when opened, will demand of us
the truth.
Eliot’s phone blew up too late the previous night;
already he was in bed.
Their texts, they light up the room:
Sam, who once was Samantha;
Molly, emergent feminist;
Ahmed, salutatorian of his middle school class;
Catalina, not yet a citizen;
Isaac, then Jared, multi ethnic kids: beauty personified.
All of them ask the same simple thing:
How could they do this to us?
My husband holds me at the bottom of the stairs
while I weep
for a country lost
to fear, hate, and false promises…
something about draining the swamp.
We hold hands while we ascend to Eliot’s room
to wake him to a new reality,
to tell him about who won and who lost.
But for a brief moment
it is just the two of us.
Allied forces.
We will tell our son—
a strong, white middle-class male
unlikely to be affected much—
that he must be an ally
for his friends who need him most.
That day, and every day after
we brace ourselves there,
against a closed door—
against the things that we may never know
and the things we know too well.
Aimee Pozorski is the author Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) and Falling after 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Pozorski has also edited or co-edited three collections on Philip Roth, along with two special issues of Philip Roth Studies. Her poems have appeared in Paper Nautilus and The Helix, among others journals. She is Professor of English and director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University.
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