Jerrold Yam (b. 1991)
SELECTED POEMS
Joshua
“This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: […] Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab […].”—Matthew 1:1-5
The names which multiplied like flowers—harlot,
innkeeper, whore—were the ones I harvested
at the blistering door of a life’s
honest work, my tavern
muscled into the city wall like a limpet
conch, where men could put away their sandals
after riding and be nourished. Yes,
threshing a living into rights and wrongs
never replenished the spice cabinet, and who
had not, at least once, smoothened out
the body’s currency
in exchange for shelter? One night,
from across the Jordan, two men arrived to spy
on Jericho, their tunics bearing shadows
of daggers at the waist, foreheads
gleaming like knives. How could I turn them
over to the king’s soldiers, when we’ve all heard
how their God
sliced open the Red Sea so they could
traverse its brackish wound?
I tucked them,
in exchange for the lives of my household
when this wall would later collapse
like a garment and the city
stripped to ruin, in the roof among golden
bales of drying flax, which was where I left
my old names and old allegiances,
those years I witnessed the signs but chose
to believe
only in circumstance, like wildflowers
at the door, things no longer
put up with or left as they are.
by Jerrold Yam
first published in Ambit (2021)
