Metamighty

Manischewitz

Red wine, the cure for common sobriety—
dizzy tea, sweet like molten meat—is just as Jewish
as any rite, any tight briar of Hebrew letter, any fetter
of Israelite slave or Yid-friar. No one should build a pyramid
with a hangover, I think it’s written, but still that Jew-gang,
tendons stretched like strings of sitars, Seder-clenched their livers
at the green pea Nile, slurped purpled red wine,
clacked bricks, and acted Exodus, the awe, optic, the carafe,
Coptic; Pharaoh punch-drunk, Hieroglyphic-fistic.
Six thousand years later, my Semitic clan unfurls,
cousin to cousin, to swat about a dozen pecks of Exodus lexis.
No taupe grape, either, for my smashed stock,
for my drunken kin who swirl the swill, fawn over Passover for
eight days, eight of their about-twenty-six thousand; six thousand
years later, the latent Seder just as filled with Jews, just as catered.
We live the Passover miracle of the ladled vine, the Passover
miracle of the fourth glass, and the greater miracle of the fifth.
My cup gripped in my Jew-paw like a bulb, ruddy filament fluming,
I truly believe Egypt was Elysian. I can hold my religion. Next to me,
unlike Aaron, Uncle Jacob, sloshed like Moses,
parts the Red Sea over and over again in his glass.

— Megan Amram