“Surface Mail” is a poem by Mildred Faintly. Mildred Faintly is a Jewish transgender woman who writes book reviews for 96thofoctober.com. Visual design by Jill Blum greengolemmag.com/surface-mail-by-mildred-faintly Surface Mail by Mildred Faintly In America, Israel was a map on my wall, a page of Bible, a newspaper headline, a star-chart whose constellations were the Hebrew alphabet — the swastika, a terrible comet-like Aleph. I’ve mailed myself into the text: the proof is the photo on my ID card, Israel’s seal stamped on my face like a heavenly postmark. Flattened by the weight of Diaspora, I slip easily into the envelope, drop on a desk in the Ministry of Immigration like foreign mail from the nineteenth century, a thin, implausible arrival speaking the language as learned from Prayerbook and Bible—King James Hebrew, and unequal to this life in three dimensions, inadequate before the white stone riddling the hills around Jerusalem, gathered into strata, tier on t...