Hum

Jamaal May

Cover

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clean off, brought icicles down. The boy listened for the sea.

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges and thanks the following publications in which poems previously appeared:

Another and Another: An Anthology from The Grind Daily Writing

Series: “If They Hand Your Remains to Your Sister in a Chinese Takeout Box”

Atlanta Review: “Triage”

Blackbird: “Man Matching Description” and “Ask What I’ve Been”

Callaloo: “Pomegranate Means Grenade”

The Collagist: “If They Hand Your Remains to Your Sister in a Chinese Takeout Box,” “Macrophobia: Fear of Waiting,” and “Thinking Like a Split Melon”

The Cortland Review: “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines”

The Drunken Boat: “The God Engine”

Foreign Policy in Focus: “Pomegranate Means Grenade”

The God Engine (Pudding House Press Chapbook Series, 2009): “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow,” “Coming Back for You,” “The Boy Who Bathes the Dead,” and “Paper Crane on Letting Go”

Gulf Coast: “On Metal” and “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea”

The Hairpin: “Hum for the Bolt”

Indiana Review: “Athazagoraphobia: Fear of Being Ignored”

The Kenyon Review: “The Sky, Now Black with Birds” and “The Hum of Zug Island”

The MacGuffin: “The Girl Who Builds Rockets from Bricks”

Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations: “Aichmophobia: Fear of Needles”

Michigan Quarterly Review: “A Detroit Hum Ending with Bones” and “Hum of the Machinist’s Lover”

Minnesota Review: “The Man Who Paints Mountains and Helicopters”

Muzzle Magazine: “I Do Have a Seam” and “Neat”

New England Review: “And Even the Living Are Lost” and “Hum for the Hammer”

The Normal School: “Hum for the Stone”

The Paris-American: “On Gentleness” and “Hum of the Machine God”

The Pedestal Magazine: “Paper Frog on Spring”

Ploughshares: “Masticated Light”

Poetry: “Hum for the Bolt”

Sixers Review: “How to Get Your Gun Safely Out of Your Mouth” and “How to Disappear Completely”

Southern Indiana Review: “Looks Like a Boy” and “Paper Tiger to Wind”

Spoon River Poetry Review: “Still Life”

Many thanks to the many friends and colleagues who made this collection possible through creative, logistical, and emotional support including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tommye Blount, Veronica Castrillon, Nandi Comer, Kahn Davison, francine j. harris, Khalid El-Hakim, Quincee Herbert, Melissa Roberts, Anna Saini, Erin Shaughnessy, Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, Scheherazade Washington, Jasmin White, and Team Turgid: Roger Bonair-Agard, J.W. Basilo, Tom Budday, and Karrie Waarala.

Thank you to the organizations that fed me in multiple ways: The Stadler Center for Poetry, Shara McCallum, Andrew Ciotola, and G.C. Waldrep; Terry Blackhawk and the Inside Out Literary Arts Project; the entire Cave Canem family, Alison Meyers, Toi Derricotte, and Cornelius Eady; Ross White and the Daily Grind Writing Series; Callaloo Writers Workshop, Dr. Charles Henry Rowell and Gregory Pardlo; Poetry Slam Incorporated and the poetry slam community; Lynn Procope and the NYC LouderArts Project; Team Fucking Nuance; Michael Collier and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference; the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Debra Allbery, and Amy Grimm; Alice James Books, Meg Willing, Carey Salerno, and the cooperative board for believing in this collection and showing that belief at every turn.

Thank you to Vievee Francis and Matthew Olzmann, the two hardest working and most generous poets I know. They may have done more for my writing life than even I have.

Special thanks to the careful eyes that gave these poems no quarter: Alan Shapiro who guided me in laying the foundation that became Hum, Gabrielle Calvocoressi for challenging me on form and endings, C. Dale Young for the revision philosophy and thoughts on organic ordering, Rick Barot for the title and his macro to micro insights, Catherine Barnett for her fresh perspective and finishing touches, Carl Phillips for his guidance and big picture advice, and Tarfia Faizullah, the first, last, and closest reader of every kobita.

And thanks especially to the May family for making me the rare poet whose craft is respected and encouraged by all of his kin: my father Claude, mother Sytoria, brothers Jabari and Jared, and my twin sister Danielle, who believed in my poetry before I even began writing it.

Dedication

Dedicated to the interior lives of Detroiters and the memory of David Blair

Still Life

Boy with roof shingles

duct taped to shins and forearms

threading barbed wire through pant loops.

Boy with a safety pin-clasped

bath towel of a cape

tucking exacto knife into sock.

Boy with rocks. Boy

with a metal grate for a shield.

Boy with a guardian

daemon and flawless skin.

Boy in the shuttered district,

a factory of shattered vials,

green and brown glass.

Boy with a tiny voice

and crooked cursive handwriting,

with bent nails in a pouch,

metal flashing scavenged in bits,

with half a neck tie

tied around the brow

pushing a fire door wide.

Boy with a boy living

in his head kept quiet

by humming a lullaby

of static and burble.

The boy in the boy’s head

watches sparse traffic

from a warehouse window

and takes notes on where

overpass paint hides rust,

where the cyan bubbles up

into a patchwork of pock

and crumbling disease,

a thief in the bridge’s body

he doesn’t see, but knows

is coming tomorrow

to swallow his song.

Hum of the Machine God

There isn’t much to discuss with the Machine

God, though its voice is hard to ignore;

it speaks in planks of wood shaped for the sea,

sputters smoke, eats grass. It speaks in snow

spit into piles, commands the motion of a needle

through a hem. It hums. It waits.

Once, in a parking lot, it spoke to the boy waiting

for an exchange between a sewing machine

and his mother to come to a close. Mother’s needle-

skilled fingers had already learned to ignore

pain, but the boy’s hands were supple. The snow

under Father’s idling car became a sea,

running into drains towards another sea

the boy hoped and hopes is out there waiting.

Almost heard it one morning, shoveling snow

as a neighbor’s open garage rattled with machinery,

boatbuilding tools, a thrum he knew to ignore.

Father said, Might as well build that boat with needles,

but the spell held the boy. To watch the needling

of a board through a notch was to see a wooden sea-

dragon and dream of riding it away. Boy, don’t ignore

me. A lip split open. Shovel. Father hated waiting

and had even less patience for the broken machine

coughing exhaust in the yard, clutching a snow-

colored stone in its throat. Yes, he prayed the snow-

blower would take Father’s hand. Yes, the needle

of Father’s scream, as a thumb was machined

clean off, brought icicles down. The boy listened for the sea.

Gripped his shovel. Gripped his oar. Now, in a waiting

room, he bows to the florescent hum and begs. Ignore

my prayer, goes his stupid little prayer, please ignore

my voice. The thumb in a jar packed with snow,

will take a miracle for doctors to reattach. Waiting,

as if to plead, Let me try my hand, give me the needle,

Mother taps a knitting needle against the sea-

foam-colored formica, rapid as a machine,

but the Machine God, still busy with the lights, ignores

the needle’s morse code prayer while the boy waits

for snowmelt in his mouth to taste of oak and sea.

Athazagoraphobia: Fear of Being Ignored

Athazagoraphobia

Fear of Being Ignored

I used to bury plum pits between houses. Buried

bits of wire there too. Used to bury matches

but nothing ever burned and nothing ever thrived

so I set fire to a mattress, disassembled a stereo,

attacked flies with a water pistol, and drowned ants

in perfume. I pierced my eyebrow, inserted

a stainless steel bar, traded that for a scar in a melee, pressed

tongue to nipple in a well-lit parking lot, swerved

into traffic while unbuttoning my shirt—

There is a woman

waiting for me to marry her or forget her name

forever — whichever loosens the ribbons from her hair.

I fill the bathtub for an enemy, lick the earlobe

of my nemesis. I try to dance like firelight

without setting anyone ablaze. I am leaning over

the railing of a bridge, seeing my face shimmer

on the river below — it’s everywhere now —

Look for me

in scattered windshield beneath an overpass,

on the sculpture of a man with metal skin grafts,

in patterns on mud-draggled wood, feathers

circling leaves in rainwater — look. Even the blade

of a knife holds my quickly fading likeness

while I run out of ways to say I am here.

How to Disappear Completely

You are quarter ghost on your mother’s side.

Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box.

Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet.

A reflecting pool gathers around your altar

of plywood subflooring and split wooden slats.

You are rag doll prone, contort,

angle and arc. Rot. Here you are

a greening abdomen, slipping skin,

flesh fly, carrion beetles. Here

where bullets found shelter,

where scythes found their function, breath lost

its place on the page, where the page was torn

out of every book before chapter’s close.

This is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect

pulled over the body, this

is your chance to escape.

Little wraith,

bend light around your skin until it colors you clear,

disappear like silica in a kiln, become

glass and glass beads, become

the staggered whir of an exhaust fan,

a presence only noticed

when gone. Become origami.

Fold yourself smaller

than ever before. Become less. More

in some ways but less

in the way a famine is less.

We will forgive you for not being

satisfied with fitting in our hands.

We will forgive you for dying to be

a bird diminutive enough

to fit in a mouth without being crushed.

Man Matching Description

Because the silk scarf could have cradled

a neck as delicate as that of a cygnet

but was instead used in last night’s strangling,

it is possible to marvel at the finish on handcuffs,

because I can marvel at handcuffs

pummeled by stones until shimmering,

the flashlight that sears my eyes

is too perfect to look away, because

a flashlight has more power on a southern roadside

than my name and blood combined

and there is no power in the very human

frequency range of my voice and my name is dead

in my mouth and my name is in a clear font on a license

I can’t reach for before being drawn down on,

because the baton is long against my window,

the gun somehow longer against my cheek,

the vehicle cold against my abdomen

as my shirt rises twisted in fingers

and my name is asked again—I want to

screech out, Swan! I am only a swan.

The Sky, Now Black with Birds

If I say riot helmets outnumbered the protesters

who, after Troy Davis was executed, stuck around

to throw useless punches into the courthouse grass

while a woman near the forest of batons

lay sprawled facedown in the lawn gripping a Bible,

a green sea beginning to memorize

the shape of her grief—If I say Death,

cure death, and had such power over the scythe,

how many cranes would it take to lift her

out of this drowning?

If I tell you

Lawrence Brewer was executed

five hours earlier for the murder of James Byrd—

if I ask you to look for birds foraging

between Brewer’s intricate tattoos,

I don’t mean to distract you from the cross

that still burned on his arm that day.

I don’t expect you to stare into a graffiti

of iron crosses and spider webs scrawled

across flesh and find a thrush vibrating with birdsong,

but I want you to know why I listen for more

than the cawing of crows:

I wanted Brewer dead.

So dead, my tongue swelled fat with hexes, so fat

I wonder how forgive could ever fit inside my mouth.

Somehow it’s always there, fluttering in the larynx

of Ross Byrd—the man whose father was dragged,

urine soaked, by Brewer behind a truck.

Watch him say it.

Forgive.

I swear,

the word has feathers. I want

to learn to get its wings between my teeth

before more retribution

blots out the sky.

When I tell you

glare flickered off a cop’s visor

and startled a single crow away

from the murder that flapped the sky into inky pieces,

I want you to watch close enough

to notice the feathers aren’t black at all.

Like bruises and ink, they are

only this full-bodied purple—purple so rich

your eyes will still swear it’s black the next time

you see it spread out across sky. Watch it

spread like the flush of pancuronium bromide

into diaphragm, watch close enough to pinpoint

when the muscles lock.

If it is said the injection

is humane, we mean to say this

is humanity: no crack of rope, jerk

of limb, no bloated face, clenched jaw, or reek

rising twisted in smoke from a cooked torso—

we mean to say there is nothing to disturb

the nest between our ribs, there is nothing

to make a heartbeat rumble

like a murder of so many wings.

Looks Like a Boy

A Detroit Hum Ending with Bones

Glass above my bed trembles

at the touch of bass pouring thunder-thick

out of twelve-inch speakers and I almost don’t mind

being jolted awake because I know this song.

It’s not a favorite song, but I know it. Sometimes

just knowing a pattern is plenty. Sometimes

I need more rattle from the cabinet, more

whir from the fan spinning in the laptop

warming my twin sister’s lap—

and when that’s not enough,

I might take off my shirt and press

my shoulders against a refrigerator—

one of those beige monsters

from the 80s you can really feel

working for its hum.

A humming bird draws

nectar in my thoughts, wings beating

80-something times per second

but there aren’t many flowers here; it’s been many

summers since I stopped even listening for bees.

I know my cell phone near a hive

can confuse insect signals,

a natural technology too outmoded

for a message vibrating in my pocket to not

make a drone go haywire

and spiral into the grass.

Is that enough?

Then what about your Chrysler that idles

so hard the tickle scurries from thigh

to earlobe? There’s always a hymn

waiting for ears. A Tibetan singing bowl

looking for an audience. A vibraphone

begs to collide over and over

with the yarn-tipped mallets you hold.

And even when you were young and smirking

and the clerk was definitely afraid of you,

the tremble of his hand made your change clink

out the notes of a small tune

made of fear, just for you.

Do you remember the key

of the plastic kazoos in choir?

Do you remember elementary science?

We were taught to read an entire sentence

before trying to fill its blanks

and began to say umm

as a placeholder for answers, as in:

“Hearing, the only sense that is completely mechanical,

occurs when sound travels the umm , vibrates

your eardrum, and is amplified by the umm ,

which is a group of tiny bones.”

On Metal

Hmmmmm, drags at the back of a throat

and becomes mmmhmm, when three men huddle

around a car, admitting some smaller defeat,

while not quite admitting the emergence of digital

parts means this won’t be solved by ratchet alone.

No one is happy to learn what an afternoon of chafed

knuckles, metal on skin, no longer solves. What can’t

be pulled from the steel tangle under a hood.

It’s as though they found the wrench that could set

free a bike from its training wheels only to discover

their daughter has had a driver’s license for years.

I clap the man at the center of this trio on his shoulder,

not quite hard enough to shake loose a cigarette

dangling almost acrobatically from his lips and say,

I’ll just take it to a dealership and be done. I say it as if this

is not a huddle—like I’m not a team manager plucking

the ball from my pitcher’s glove early in a game

that falls near the wane of an otherwise solid career.

Detroit’s building’em like robots now, he concedes, slams

the hood and rattles the chassis. He’s probably right,

considering the clank of metal closing on metal,

but I still can’t help thinking of how much the frame

is like my frame. The mystery of my Chrysler’s right side

not responding—silent speaker, head lamp dead, window

sealed shut, frozen power door lock—is no more

mystifying than my left ear’s limited frequency range

or the left eye I’m now told is blind by a doctor

who huddles over me to assess some unknown damage.

Damage that is ongoing. A diminishment I’ll live with.

I don’t get cars, but I get this: how difficult it is to get

a wreck off cinder blocks and why my dad once fiddled

daily with a dead Camaro, refusing to believe its silence.

Masticated Light

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center

my fingers trace the outline of folded money

and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there

is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend

but will spend on a calm voice that can explain

how I can be repaired. Instead, the words legally blind

and nothing can be done mean I’ll spend

the rest of the week closing an eye to the world,

watching how easily this becomes that.

The lampposts lining the walk home

are the thinnest spears I’ve ever seen, a row of trash cans

becomes discarded war drums, and teeth

in the mouth of an oncoming truck

want to tear through me. Some of me

always wants to be swallowed.

The last thing my doctor said before I lost

my insurance was to see a vision specialist

about the way light struggles and bends

through my deformed cornea.

Before the exam I never closed my right eye

and watched the world become a melting watercolor

with the left. Before a doctor shot light

into the twitching thing, before I realized

how little light I could handle, I never

thought much of the boy who clawed up at me

from beneath my punches, how a fingernail scraped

the eye, or how it closed shut

like a door to a room I could never leave.

I could see the reflective mesh of his shoes,

the liquor bottle tossed in an arc

even before it shattered at my feet, and I am embarrassed

at how sharp my eyes were, how deft my body,

my limbs closing the distance—how easily

I owned his face, its fear and fought back tears—

all of it mine. I don’t want to remember the eyes

that glanced over shoulder just before

I dragged him like a gazelle into the grass

that was a stretch of gravel and glass

outside a liquor store. How easily this becomes that.

On a suspension bridge I close my bad eye

and it’s like aiming through a gunsight;

even the good eye is only as good as whatever glass

an optometrist can shape. I watch sundown

become a mouth. Broad and black-throated,

it devours the skyline and every reflection.

Horns sprout from the head of my silhouette

rippling dark, dark, dark against the haze of water

and I try to squint that monster

into the shape of a man.

On Gentleness

Tell me I once came close. That your body wasn’t

an obelisk and mine, so much wire wound

around wire. I will always wonder

if I can take you, know you will always be stronger,

and marvel at how you appear even larger

than before with my niece cupped

in your tattooed arms. I know something simple

provokes you to call: a comic book

we’ve both read, a good time

to visit, but my thumb hovers over decline

and I hold my breath before I press

against the waiting answer.

Before I left for Florida—a week after I tore

the collar of my shirt twisting out

of your grip, a week after

I disappeared with our shared car, the Venture

minivan we nicknamed Vendetta,

and brought it back to you

empty and smashed—you stopped to tell me

never come back. You meant it. I said

I wouldn’t. I meant flinching

is something I’d only do in oncoming light, never

in the overcoat of a shadow; being the size of

a threat did strange things to my tongue.

Tell me about the night I hurled a phone receiver

at your head and the orb of blood on your lip

seemed like it’d never fall, how you

bound me by a wrist, bruised my ribs against the floor,

and never threw a single punch. Wasn’t that

a kind of gentleness, Jabari?

Chionophobia: Fear of Snow

Chionophobia

Fear of Snow

Fluttering ash dissolves on your brother’s tongue.

He thinks of you building a fort from snow

before you knew what forts were

and he could stand in your footprints

without touching the sides.

Can two snowflakes be the same

on a ghost-white street where enough gather

to construct faceless snowmen? In this desert,

sand blinds the way snow did back home.

Your brother patches holes

in men with names he can’t or won’t learn,

and wonders if, somehow, you are still here,

using an earthmover to pour sand

into foxholes. Do you still hear soldiers claw

at the shifting weight of their fresh graves,

or are there only silent arms and legs

in your dreams, bent like strange flowers?

Is the sun a flash grenade? This heat

is so heavy the fruit stands buckle and ripple

like mirages, but your brother shivers

remembering your mother’s shiver,

the way she sank to the ground, heavy

with news, and your body comes home again.

Your bone-colored casket repeats

its descent, sinks under the flag, and a thud

resounds. Fades. He still hears it.

The rub of your snow pants, the fallout

of snowball fights, every ice-ball slapping

garage, snowflakes dragged in circles

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Hum