That’s the job, he said, shrugging his shoulders and running his hand through his hair, like Dante, or a spider that knows its web, That’s just the job, he repeated stubbornly whenever I complained about working the night shift in hundred-degree heat, or hauling my ass over the hump for a foul-mouthed dispatcher yelling at us over a loudspeaker, or riding the cab of an iron dungeon creeping over bumpy rails to a steel mill
All morning in the February light he has been mending cable, splicing the pairs of wires together according to their colors, white-blue to white-blue violet-slate to violet-slate, in the warehouse attic by the river.
When he is finished the messages will flow along the line: thank you for the gift, please come to the baptism, the bill is now past due: voices that flicker and gleam back and forth across the tracer-colored wires.
During the last 50 miles back from haul & some months past my 15th birthday, my father fishes a stuffed polar bear from a Salvation Army gift-bin, labeled Boys: 6-10. I can almost see him approach the decision: cold, a little hungry, not enough
money in his pocket for coffee. He worries he might fall asleep behind the wheel as his giant, clumsy love for that small word—son—guides his gaze to the crudely-sewn fabric of the miniature bear down at the bottom of the barrel. Seasons have flared
A woman tattoos Malik’s name above her breast & talks about the conspiracy to destroy blacks. This is all a fancy way to say that someone kirked out, emptied five or six or seven shots into a still warm body. No indictment follows Malik’s death, follows smoke running from a fired pistol. An old quarrel: crimson against concrete & the officer’s gun still smoking. Someone says the people need to stand up, that the system’s a glass house falling on only a few heads. This & the stop snitching ads are the conundrum and damn all that blood. All those closed eyes imagining Malik’s killer forever coffled to a series of cells, & you almost believe them, you do, except the cognac in your hand is an old habit, a toast to friends buried before the daybreak of their old age. You know the truth of the talking, of the quarrels & how history lets the blamed go blameless for the blood that flows black in the street; you imagine there is a riot going on, & someone is tossing a trash can
The evening news helicopters compete for the best camera angle above the water, fighting to find anything worthy of coverage.
A floating high chief. A baby’s arm flattened by a coconut tree. Anything Even the Titanic was enormous enough to leave remnants of itself
to buoyancy. They were a giving people. There’s gotta be something here. Congress assembles immediately to vote on a bill that supports relief efforts
for our displaced, and our Congressman sits in his own numbing silence, knowing that by law: he still does not have a vote that will count for anything
due to the U.S. national status of our island country, as he watches
The teacher can’t hear the children over all this monsoon racket, all the zillion spoons whacking the rusty roofs, all the wicked tin streams flipping full-grown bucks off their hooves. Everywhere there used to be a river, there’s a bigger river now. Every hard face on the block is sopping. Even the court where girls from St. Ignominius ran the roughneck boys off to play
I dropped down against the mosque wall curled my shoulders in let my feet fall apart tilting toward the rubble-dusted floor tried to still my lashes as rifles came clanging in their muzzles smelling out fever heated off a pulse I was playing dead
The border is a line that birds cannot see. The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half. The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires. The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe. The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend. The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein. The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going. The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so
And when, in the city in which I love you, even my most excellent song goes unanswered, and I mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search of you…
That I negotiate fog, bituminous rain ringing like teeth into the beggar’s tin, or two men jackaling a third in some alley weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
We were barely out of middle school when Stuart showed me the scar— an S branded in his brown arm. Solid, Stuart said, fresh from his initiation. They held him down in a basement, seared his skin. He wanted another family.
We were barely out of middle school when Stuart showed me the scar— an S branded in his brown arm. Solid, Stuart said, fresh from his initiation. They held him down in a basement, seared his skin. He wanted another family.
Once, at the end of his shift, he came out and in the first slant light the parking lot glittered like the one time he’d seen the sea. The machines still roared in his-ears. There’d been no breakdowns the whole night. His sandwich in its brown bag had warmed and the cheese melted a little. He had eaten around midnight.
Thick at the school gate are the ones Rage has twisted Into minotaurs, harpies Relentlessly swift; So you must walk past the pincers, The swaying horns, Sister, sister, Straight through the gusts Of fear and fury, Straight through;
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue
In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm pressed against the ice-feathered window, the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed, walked toward it when the men in the booths were finished crushing hundred dollar bills
She is the vessels on the table before her: the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red and upside down. Bent over, she is the mortar and the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angled in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand. She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow— the color of blood,
One day I will write a poem about my father as a mountain, and there will be no shame for the dynamite and the blasted hole, the pickaxes and steam drills paving their own resolute path, for the railroad ploughed through his core,
