EXODUS
“So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken”
— Genesis 3:22
and then the rental subsidies all dried up like so much once-tillable land,
the type where no one can live now, not even plants, not unless your
strange and vengeful god places you there to wander for forty years so you
spend the next four millennia thanking him anyway because at least it’s
better than Egyptian chains
and then across an ocean, how the bottom dropped out from under the
economy like a breaking bridge and there was nothing left to build
with and we daily mourned how homeownership became a deadweight
tied to the drowning American dream while rarely mentioning so many
who paid to live on another’s land now banished to the desert, but this
time they hadn’t prayed for freedom from Pharaoh, just to stay in one
place, keep their kids in the same school district,
to exist. After all, I think therefore I am doesn’t mean much outside the
classroom. In the rest of the world, you’ve gotta have an address. As it is
written:
On the 1st day
god said let there be light
but the next month it
was shut off for nonpayment
On the 3rd day,
god made land
On the 6th day,
god said this land
would be owned and
those without a
plot to their name
would thereafter wander
through the desert to Jerusalem
or from their bed to their friend’s couch
to the street to their mom’s couch
to the street again until they find a pasture
whose master grants them entry
though the Lord will still own their yield
and then the manna in heaven all dried up when we embraced his most
mysterious ways and insisted on employment requirements and drug tests
for food stamps, Medicaid, TANF. So you have to work to prove you’re
too sick to work. So you have to pay rent before you get help paying rent.
Plus, for god to even acknowledge your prayers at all, you’ve gotta have
an address.
“EXODUS,” by Eric Sirota, adapted from The Rent Eats First, Copyright © 2024. Courtesy of Button Poetry.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where I direct the Tenant Advocacy Clinic. This poem is from The Rent Eats First, a book of my poetry published by Button Poetry in 2024. The book revolves around my life and identity as a housing attorney. I chose this poem, in large part, because it highlights the existential absurdity of our system’s treatment of low-income renters. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel and constant refrain that our society seems to broadcast indiscriminately. But to do so—at the very least—people need bootstraps. Still, we erect more and more barriers to families meeting their fundamental needs: food, medical care, housing. These basic necessities are the “bootstraps”—the fundamentals any person needs to thrive.
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