How to Be Drawn

Terrance Hayes

ALSO BY TERRANCE HAYES

Lighthead

Wind in a Box

Hip Logic

Muscular Music

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Penguin Books 2015

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hayes, Terrance.

[Poems. Selections]

How to be drawn / Terrance Hayes.

pages ; cm.—(Penguin poets)

ISBN 978-0-698-18319-3

I. Title.

PS3558.A8378A6 2015

811'.54—dc23

2014045785

Cover design: Alison Forner

Cover art: Terrance Hayes

Cover hand lettering: Jaya Miceli

Version_1

for the ones like us

Also by Terrance Hayes

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

I. TROUBLED BODIES

What It Look Like

The Deer

How to Be Drawn to Trouble

New York Poem

As Traffic

Wigphrastic

My Life as a Hummer

Gentle Measures

A Concept of Survival

Who Are the Tribes

II. INVISIBLE SOULS

Black Confederate Ghost Story

How to Draw an Invisible Man

Barberism

The Carpenter Ant

American Sonnet for Wanda C.

Like Mercy

A. Machine

Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report: Part I

Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report: Part II

Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report: Part III

Elegy with Zombies for Life

Instructions for a Séance with Vladimirs

III. A CIRCLING MIND

The Rose Has Teeth

Antebellum House Party

Reconstructed Reconstruction

We Should Make a Documentary About Spades

For Crying Out Loud

Model Prison Model

Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh

New Jersey Poem

Self-Portrait as the Mind of a Camera

How to Draw a Perfect Circle

Ars Poetica for the Ones Like Us

Notes

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications for first acknowledging the poems (and previous versions of the poems) in this manuscript.

The American Reader, American Studies, The Baffler, CHORUS—A Literary Mixtape, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Gwarlingo.com, heartjournal online.com, huffingtonpost.org, Huizache, jubilat, Los Angeles Review, Manor House Quarterly, The New Yorker, New York Times T Magazine, The Normal School, Poet Lore, Poetry Magazine, poets.org Poem-A-Day, A Public Space, Rattle, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, storyscapejournal.com, tate.org.uk: Tate Etc. Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, Terminus, and Vinyl.

“New Jersey Poem” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, edited by Denise Duhamel and David Lehman. “The Rose Has Teeth” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman. “Model Prison Model” also appeared in 2011 Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses.

The poem “Who Are the Tribes” first appeared as a chapbook published by Pilot Books in 2011, with thanks to Betsy Wheeler. “Like Mercy” also appeared in the chapbook Between Ghosts (Center for Book Arts, 2010), with thanks to Sharon Dolin.

“Gentle Measures” was written for the “Gods and Monsters” theme in the Hugo House literary series. “How to Draw an Invisible Man” also was published online by the United States Postal Service for the centennial Ralph Ellison stamp. “Instructions for a Séance with Vladimirs” was first commissioned as part of the Book Wings project, a collaboration between the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the Moscow Art Theatre, with thanks to Nate Brown and Christopher Merrill. “Antebellum House Party” was first written for Found Anew: New Writing Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections, with thanks to Ray McManus.

Deepest gratitude to Yona Harvey and Paul Slovak for their help with this collection, and to the United States Artists Zell Fellowship for its generous support. Thanks as well to friends who influenced this manuscript through encouragement and conversation: Elizabeth Alexander, Rob Casper, Radiclani Clytus, Toi Derricotte, and Shara McCallum.

A letter moves backwards with its own wings . . .

—Rammellzee

WHAT IT LOOK LIKE

Dear Ol’ Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw,

I don’t especially care for Duke Ellington

at a birthday party. I care less and less

about the shapes of shapes because forms

change and nothing is more durable than feeling.

My uncle used the money I gave him

to buy a few vials of what looked like candy

after the party where my grandma sang

in an outfit that was obviously made

for a West African king. My motto is

Never mistake what it is for what it looks like.

My generosity, for example, is mostly a form

of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief,

but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna.

This only looks like a footnote in my report

concerning the party. Trill stands for what is

truly real though it may be hidden by the houses

just over the hills between us, by the hands

on the bars between us. That picture

of my grandmother with my uncle

when he was a baby is not trill. What it is

is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift

along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain

taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast

is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan

is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful

only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying,

my motto is Never mistake what it looks like

for what it is else you end up like that Negro

Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don’t you lie

about who you are sometimes and then realize

the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother

Bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom

searching for the king. And that’s okay.

No one will tell you you are the king.

No one really wants a king anyway.

THE DEER

Outside Pataskala I saw the deer with a soft white belly,

the deer with two eyes as blind as holes, I saw it leap

from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before

it leapt it had been a bush beside the highway, and saw

how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature bony

as a branch in spring, and when I closed my eyes, I found

the scent of muscadine, the berry my mother plucked

Sundays from the roadside where fumes toughened

its speckled skin and seeds slept suspended in a mucus

thick as the sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry

along the road, but chewed it reminded me of speed,

and I saw when I was the deer that I didn’t have to be a deer,

I could become a machine with a woman inside it

moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze

and on the muscadine’s flesh, which is almost meat,

the sweet pulp a muscadine leaves when it’s crushed

in the teeth of a deer, or a mother for that matter

or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed

a berry uglier than shame, though it is not like this

for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human,

it is only almost human when it looks on the road

and leaps covering at least thirty feet in a blink, the deer

I cannot be, the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough

to ignore anything that runs but is not alive, a trafficking

machine filled with a distracted mind and body deadly

and durable enough to deconstruct a deer when it leaps,

I’m telling you, like someone being chased. I remember

a friend told me how, when he was eight or nine,

a half-naked woman ran to the car window crying her man

was after her with a knife, but his mother locked the doors

and sped away. Someone tell him his mother was not

a coward. That’s what he thinks. Tell him it was because

he and his little brother were in the car, she would not

let the troubled world inside. It was no one’s fault.

The mind separated from the body. I could almost see

the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue,

the raised buds soft as a bed of pink seeds,

the hole of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold

a whole baby inside, I could almost see its eyes

at the back of her throat, I could definitely hear its cries.

HOW TO BE DRAWN TO TROUBLE

The people I live with are troubled by the way I have been playing

“Please, Please, Please” by James Brown and the Famous Flames

All evening, but they won’t say. I’ve got a lot of my mother’s music

In me. James Brown is no longer a headwind of hot grease

And squealing for ladies with leopard-skinned intentions,

Stoned on horns and money. Once I only knew his feel-good music.

While my mother watched convicts dream, I was in my bedroom

Pretending to be his echo. I still love the way he says Please

Ten times straight, bending the one syllable until it sounds

Like three. Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities

Of the soul. Once, my mother bit the wrist of a traffic cop

But was not locked away because like him, she was an officer

Of the state. She was a guard at the prison in which James Brown

Was briefly imprisoned. There had been broken man-made laws,

A car chase melee, a roadblock of troopers in sunblock.

I, for one, don’t trust the police because they go around looking

To eradicate trouble. T-R-oh-you-better-believe

In trouble. Trouble is how we learn what the soul is.

James Brown, that brother could spice up any sentence he uttered

Or was given. His accent made it sound like he was pleading

Whether he was speaking or singing. A woman can make a man

Sing. After another of my mother’s disappearances, my father left her

Bags on the porch. My father believes a man should never dance

In public. Under no circumstances should a grown man have hair

Long enough to braid. If I was a black girl, I’d always be mad.

I might weep too and break. But think about the good things.

My mother and I love James Brown in a cape and sweat

Like glitter that glows like little bits of gold. In the photo she took

With him, he holds her wrist oddly, probably unintentionally

Covering her scar. There’s the trouble of being misunderstood

And the trouble of being soul brother number one sold brother

Godfather dynamite. Add to that the trouble of shouting

“I got to get out!” “I got to get down!” “I got to get on up the road!”

For many years there was a dancing competition between

My mother and father though rarely did they actually dance.

They did not scuffle like drums or cymbals, but like something

Sluggish and close to earth. You know how things work

When they don’t work? I want to think about the good things.

The day after the Godfather of Soul finished signing just that

All over everything in the prison, all my mother wanted to talk

About were his shoes. For some reason, he had six or seven pairs

Of Italian leather beneath his bunk suggesting where he’d been,

Even if for the moment, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Think about how little your feet would touch the ground

If you were on your knees pleading two or three times a day.

There are theories about freedom, and there is a song that says

None of us are free. My mother had gone out Saturday night,

And came home Sunday an hour or so before church.

She punched clean through the porch window

When we wouldn’t let her in. I can still hear all the love buried

Under all the noise she made. But sometimes I hear it wrong.

It’s not James Brown making trouble, it’s trouble he’s drawn to:

Baby, you done me wrong. Took my love, and now you’re gone.

It’s trouble he’s asking to stay. My father might have said Please

When my mother was beating the door and then calling to me

From the window. I might have heard her say Please just before

Or just after the glass and then the skin along her wrist broke.

Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, that’s how James Brown says it.

Please, please, please, please, please, Honey, please don’t go.

NEW YORK POEM

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown

one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles

of buildings where there are more miles

of shortcuts and alternative takes than

there are Miles Davis alternative takes.

There is a white girl who looks hijacked

with feeling in her glittering jacket

and her boots that look made of dinosaur

skin and R is saying to her I love you

again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop

in New York anything can happen.

Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word

for slaughterhouse. Someone says

mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so

fucking vain I cannot believe anyone

is threatened by me. In New York

not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,

dear girl with a bar code tattooed

on the side of your face, and everyone

writing poems about and inside and outside

the subways, dear people underground

in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles

of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown

where Miles Davis is pumping in,

and someone is telling me about contranyms,

how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word

looking in opposite directions, I now know

“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.

That’s how I think of New York. Someone

jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,

and someone jonesing for grace.

AS TRAFFIC

Sounds like the hook in a chart topper

A rapper mouths squatting like a gilded animal

In the middle of a bustling boulevard

Of bumpers and bumping bikini rumps,

Chains, chains, chains, but it is meant to conjure

My half brother, and the girls the news says

He’d kidnapped or persuaded with knuckles

Before the police rushed in knocking him

Like a lover no longer loved to the motel floor

His long arm was chained to a cell phone

The one time I met him he called me brother

And said our father had more children like us

All over town while UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem”

(“My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck

Without a rubber”) bumped in the background

Foolishly, I did not think the worst of the music

I adore had anything to do with having power

Over anyone else, the naked women as bountiful

As traffic, the half-naked men who cannot grow

Stiff without looking at reflections of themselves

While the camera glares an inch from their genitals

Might have wanted before porn simply to play