then, now, no
thanks, I’d prefer the type of eternity where we
are inside, are
us, & last night’s movie good,
not great, a stray piece of popcorn still under
our coffee table.
Do you remember when the world
signed the letter yours ephemerally?
Remember when I asked you about the rain,
the cats & dogs of it,
if it was 50% cats, 50% dogs, 100%
falling, & you said, Of course?
& you said, She’s gotten, the flight’s not till, I’m going
to drive. I remember you
driving to your mother, West Texas
to Upstate New York, you didn’t make it in time, she had little time,
then none. I remember your face pressed
into my shoulder. I remember your mother was an endless,
a question your face asked into my shoulder. How I wanted it
to answer because I couldn’t. I didn’t go
with you, when I could’ve, I chose a poetry reading
instead, thought, she’ll be there, you’ll be, is memory the best
eternity we can make?
The only?
& you said it’s equal, the cats & dogs raining
down, though in terms of overall
volume. The rain, it’s all the different breeds of cat, of dog, & see,
there are more individual cats, since there are more
very large breeds of dog,
the cats have to balance things out
with their number, but the dogs, don’t you worry, they’re raining
down, too, & they’re rain,
absolutely, they’re still rain, the cats & dogs,
lots of water for the plants, for the flowers, for the whole street
& our dusty car windows, for the cats & dogs
on the ground, the cats & dogs
that aren’t rain, at least
not yet, & maybe that’s another
eternity, the rainy type.
I remember you drove us home.
The radio was on. We made a sound like a lid coming off.
from Ploughshares
SU CHO Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana
A is for apples shipped fresh off the
Boat. At 2 PM we left math to go where
Children are taught
Differences between
English and English at home.
For example, Sun-Ah who named herself Sunny
Grabbed blue pills from a plastic bag,
Held the medicine in her palm. Teachers called me in—
Ibuprofen, I say. I am seven,
Just learned the word because Sunny sputtered
Korean that they’re painkillers.
Look, English was my second language but
My tongue was new.
Never had to teach me to curl my Rs
Or how to say girl, blueberries, raspberries. In second grade, I
Played Peter Rabbit’s mother rabbit, still don’t
Quite know how that happened or
Remember what my lines were.
Still, when the Chicago Field Museum unveiled Sue
The T-Rex, I was Sue the dinosaur, before that, Sue who lived in an old shoe.
Usually I said “Yes, like the T-Rex without the useless e at the end.”
Versions of my selves in ESL exist but I was kept there, after proficiency.
Who else could translate for the teachers, my parents, and Sunny’s parents?
X was for xylophones, x-rays, and now xenophobia.
Yes, that’s too on the nose, but things on your nose are hardest to see.
Z is for a zero, zigzagging between classrooms to say she has a fever, she misses home.
from New England Review
AMA CODJOE After the Apocalypse
1.
After the apocalypse, I yearned to be reckless. To smash
a glass brought first to my lips. To privilege lust over
tomorrow. To walk naked down the middle of a two-lane
road. But, too late, without my bidding, life cracked open,
rushed, openmouthed, like a panting dog whose name
I did not call—my lips shut like a purse. The last man
I kissed was different than the last man I fucked.
We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone
by longing, drawing night from the cracks
inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could,
until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats
quieted in private fatigue. I’d be lying if I said I don’t recall
his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still
all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.
Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs,
the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet.
2.
After the apocalypse, I mothered my mother, became
grandmother to myself, distant and tender, temples turning
gray. The whole world cascaded past my shoulders, like the hair
self-hatred taught me to crave—though all my Barbie dolls
were black. And the Cabbage Patch Kid my grandmother
placed under the artificial Christmas tree, sprinkled with tinsel,
in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where my mother waited
for her first pair of glasses in the Colored Only waiting room.
She said the world changed from black-and-white to Technicolor
that day. My mother watches TV as I roll her hair. She sits
between my legs. I’ve never birthed a child. I have fondled the crown
of a lover’s head, my thighs framing his dark brown eyes.
I entered the world excised from my mother’s womb. Her scar
is a mark the color of time. I am my mother’s weeping
wound. On my last birthday, I cried into bathwater.
I hid my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.
3.
After the apocalypse, I had the urge to dance on the president’s
grave. The dispossessed threw me a belated quinceañera. My godmother
wore a necklace of the dictator’s teeth. She sliced an upside-down cake,
licked her forefinger, and said, “You have mastered sadness, querida,
may your rage be sticky and sweet.” My father offered his hand—this time
I took it. We glided like ballroom dancers across the red dirt floor.
He wore a grave expression. I embraced him tightly
so as to cloak my face. Instead of a toast, he handed me a handkerchief,
wet with tears. My father circled the guests silently, dabbing gently
each of their cheeks. This too was a dance unfolding.
I folded the handkerchief into a fist and raised my fist like
a glass of champagne. The pain in my father’s eyes sparkled
like the sequins on my tattered gown. If it hadn’t been so ugly
it would’ve been beautiful. The party ended just as the world had:
with the sound of rain beating against the earth and each of us
on our hands and knees peering into pools of mud and thirst.
4.
After the apocalypse, time turned like a mood ring. My mood
changed like a thunderstruck sky. The sky changed
like a breast, engorged, staining the front of a white silk blouse.
I got laid off. I went thirteen days without wearing a bra. I changed
my mind about the fiction of money. Money changed hands.
I washed my hands religiously. Religion changed into sunlight—
something allowed to touch my face. My face changed into
my mother’s. No, into a mask of my mother’s face. Traces
of heartache changed into a pain in
my right hip. The stock market
dipped. The S&P fell freely. I did not fall to my knees
promising to change my life. The price of paper towels changed
and the price of toilet paper and the price of white bread and milk.
Whiteness did not change. Some things stayed the same. We named
the moon for its changes, but it remained the same. Gravity
pulled at my organs like the moon’s tug makes a king tide.
America’s king would inevitably change and inevitably stay the same.
5.
After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands
and screamed and screamed and squeezed and screamed after
regret and shame and a single bush filled with speckled thrushes
singing redwing bluebird wood thrush on the wood of a branch
and forest thrush in the branches of a forest open pine
and after your mother refused to haunt your dreams after
you placed her in a wooden coffin and you sang like a blue bird
breast trembling beak open like a mother’s beak foraging feeding
offspring after lying on a clutch of blue eggs and after spring
after pining for spring ignorant of your grief and unraveling
with or without your blessing cool days and rain after icicles
crying and after you kept from crying and after you cried
there was no one left to protect after you blessed the demon
possessing you and after it left you were even more alone
a grandala calling and calling and after calling after your mother
a hole closed and a hole opened after that after all of that.
6.
There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed
or kissed, a faint mark: split skin sewn.
And so, and now, there was never a before. Never
a time when the wind did not smell of dust
or storm or brine or blood. Never an hour when I entered
a field of bluebells without trampling at least one flower.
And so, and then, on the day I was born, a stampede
how the universe formed. The planet is dying:
the horses, the mothers, the farmers, the bees. I am
the ground, its many grasses and wild clover.
My teeth grow yellow, ache, decay. I wash a plate,
polishing the moon’s face—both will outlast my brutal
hands. And so, in the minutes of after, the moon drips
on a silver rack and the plate floats, cracked with age,
in outer space… a stray soapsud sparkles then bursts.
from The Yale Review
HENRI COLE Gross National Unhappiness
No, I am not afraid of you
descending the long white marble steps
from a White Hawk helicopter
to a state-sponsored spectacle
of mansplaining and lies.
If you divide the sea,
you will wind up in a ditch.
The she-goat will mount the he-goat.
Good deeds will cut out our tongues.
No tree will penetrate a radiant sky.
Can’t you see our tents cannot be separated?
Can’t you see your one thousand dogs
are not greater than our
one thousand gazelles?
from The American Scholar
BILLY COLLINS On the Deaths of Friends
Either they just die
or they get sick and die of the sickness
or they get sick, recover, then die of something else,
or they get sick, appear to recover
then die of the same thing,
the sickness coming back
to take another bite out of you
in the forest of your final hours.
And there are other ways,
which will not be considered here.
In the evening, I closed my eyes
by the shore of a lake and I pretended
this is what it will look like
or will not look like,
this is where my friends keep going,
a “place” only in quotations marks,
where instead of oxygen, there is silence
unbroken by the bark of a fox in winter
or the whistle of an unattended kettle.
With eyes still closed,
I ran in the dark toward that silence,
like a man running along a train platform,
and when I opened my eyes to see
who was running in the other direction
with outspread arms,
there was the lake again with its ripples,
a breeze coming off the water,
and a low train whistle,
and there was I trembling
under the trees, passing clouds,
and everything else that was pouring
over the mighty floodgates of the senses.
from The Paris Review
ADAM O. DAVIS Interstate Highway System
In the beginning, I was
incorporate, plain as skull,
in cahoots though inchoate:
a suit suited to combust—
my body a blunderbuss
brandished in traffic bright
as dogbite. I drifted like sand
under the wind’s hand, saw
supercells & speed traps,
saw God in the face of a forest
fire. The sky was froth,
the land foment: ichor & ozone,
bee swarm & wildflower—
every living thing shivering
under the long-range bellow
of the transnational semi-trailer truck.
Thrush melodies tumbled forth
from trees still full of the didactic
temper of birds, but I could only
froth & foment—my tongue
diabetic with word, deeded
of my mouth. Thereafter,
I heeded hints & omens, held
hearsay dear as a family Bible
so listened smartly when gossip
hopscotched households
like housefire. In later years
I leaned prophetic, suffered
visions—saw myself sullen
on a windswept prairie, saw
myself salved in a station flush
with tropical disease, snakes
shaking in my fists like bad mail.
Still, when I slept I slept sound
under the promise of diesel.
When I dreamt I dreamt darkly
under the auspices of convenience.
When I woke I ate in the assurance
of eating all I could. And when
finally I corrected my iconography
I wept to find my eyes ever-blue,
the sun fled—clouds militant,
the moon an ambulance of rock.
Under its urgency I succumbed
to the hobby of my body, held
my health like a cigarette from
the world I watched through
drawn curtains, listening all night
to the opera of wolves behind
the motels of America. Wolves
I ran with, wolves I ran from.
I lived on stick. I lived on stone.
I hunted myself any way I could.
from The Believer
KWAME DAWES Before the Riot
But someone will ’ave to pay
For all the innocent blood…
—Bob Marley, “We and Dem”
On the dreary trudge—the frontier begins. A hundred years later,
almost two, a woman says in the way of appeasement,
“Perhaps it is true, that for us to live so well,
some of them had to die…?” The question suggest
ed
by the nervous lift in inflection at the end of phrase—
and who is this “us” who have lived so well, who are living
so well; and how well—so that there is a peculiar
justification, a terrible logic, and it is a haunting
confession buried deep inside the book, though, in truth,
there is no question there. This is its own duplicity, this questioning,
this effortless way of speaking the tragic: there has been blood,
so much blood, and the rituals of bludgeoning,
of rust-tanned white men, clichéd westerners, hunters,
the stereotypes, the killers of vermin rabbits
under-wheel of trucks, the people she knows intimately,
like a daughter knows her father, knows her brothers,
knows the scent of Scotch on her grandfather’s breath;
the comfort of their manliness, stoic as stone, they will kill,
as easily as threaten even the softer bodies of their women—
it is a logical equation, a management of ethics,
and who are the dead, the slaughtered and the erased?
Tribes and tribes, whose faces I do not know,
though I know that the logic of this pragmatism—
this expiation of guilt, but the embrace of guilt,
as a kind of penance—is familiar, and the faces of those
bloodshot eyes, skins chalky with deprivation, the weary look
of slaves, those faces are as familiar as the panting bodies
of the football team strewn on the wide grass, undressed
in the heat, sweating, bodies broken after pleasure—the familiar look
of black bodies coffered by desire and violence, familiar as this.
And that saying—that Darwinian logic: “Perhaps it is true,
that for us to live so well, some of them had to die…?”
offered in the soft voice of a Midwestern woman,
who never rushes her words, who carries in her throat
the secret to receiving mercy, a kind of forgiveness,
an expiation of guilt, who we count among those
in whose mouths ice couldn’t melt; mouths of tender
duplicity—perhaps, perhaps for us to live
as we do, and by this, I mean we who contemplate
anger and bombs, and chants, today—perhaps,
it’s true: that someone will have to pay, as we say.