Cover Page

PITT POETRY SERIES

ED OCHESTER, EDITOR

. . . either I’m nobody or I’m a nation

DEREK WALCOTT

ICARUS IMPOSTER SYNDROME

How much time do you really need me to spend on the lust

for an eternal summer     or a father’s gaze     before I can say

Every flight makes me a little more dead and you can take it

on faith or at least the reasonable suspension of disbelief?

Which     I’ve been told     is the prerequisite of all good

myths   Do you believe me if I say that all I was ever good

for was a death        that was remarkable            only where

ambition gives way to a popular moral?      I am saying

it is a good myth       because so many hands keep painting it

this good kid       to whom     this could have never happened

if the world was not the world         This smart kid who only

ever lived      the once      and soon        or already never again

I am saying it is a good myth because we burn all the time

and at different velocities and this is how I first knew that

I was different         I was given an impression of what I could

never hope to operate        I was given the fable and never

left the ground        If I say that this is a story that ends

in drowning I think you know who must have given the eulogy

off camera          If this is the case I think you do not understand

the physics of ambition     when ambition is the only reason

that you are something like free        I mean from that height

you cannot enter the water         the heat has met your back

and if you hit the water        the ocean’s desire to reject the living

would snap Icarus’ neck before taking the good kid into the inevitable

Everything a father does to keep a son alive is a futile exercise

In certain iterations of the legend     Icarus must have been as dark

as me by the time he was what he was always going to become

And it is   I think   always the way with such things   For the longest

time I could not make it out of a poem alive    This one is no different

I was     conceived as a fable       It is always the way of such things

that I lift my tongue towards my mother’s country and find the ridges

at the top of my mouth scalding     perdóname I repent for not being

enough of anything That I was placed in a school       like my own dark

father     miles from any reflection     until the river the lake the ocean

beckoned below     That I could hear doom sizzling at the back of my neck

for years before I realized what I want so much to make you believe

Every desire kills us by degrees Do you believe me if I say I only ever wanted

to be worthy of my father’s grief? Of the kind of obsession that nearly drowns

us? Do I need to tell you that I am my father’s son for you to know only one of us

can survive? How much do I need to tell you about how a good son dies too

before I can make you believe Daedalus circled until his throat was as raw

as any featherless bird?

A THOUSAND CARDINALS

Imagine my first moon

wasn’t a moon at all

but a crescent incision

in my mother    Imagine

my disappointment

when I realized no light

would ever be so full

as the gore I passed through

just to be born

If I am ever as successful

at leaving as I aspire to be

I suppose it would go like this

I decide to stay           and then a bloom

of cardinals peel themselves

from my back            I splinter into a thousand dead

relatives

just like that            I’m my mother’s son         all over again

What was the last thing you loved enough

to open something that was not a border

I was born and the scar makes my mother

exactly the island that her parents fled

Every sacrifice begets a question

What would you give to never have to flee again?

I mean         my father asked my mother to not teach me Spanish

So I would not be confused            my mother traded her tongue

and I sound as if I am only his son          What sacrifice          to say allegiance

to my small dark mouth        and not be understood        on purpose

wash the moon        clean of crimson         until I was barely born at all

In order for me to exist       somebody has to have had sex

In order for me to exist       one thing has to be at the gate

rattling       until answer

At the end of sex a sacrifice has to be made unless a sacrifice was made during

I do both             just to be safe           I give and give my tongue

and I am my mother’s son

because the tongue keeps showing up in my mouth

I want to stop           being             this way        I ask

what it would take to be a sacrifice worthy of the sacrifices that precede me

a trail of wings through which the sun appears to always be in retreat

I am placed in a school that costs my parents so much

The nature of sacrifice is recursive         we give up

home after home             a child is left at the brink

of what is known    and we trust an illogical love    that I could bring myself back

I want to know when enough has been given  I want to know when I’m allowed

to stop

I ask my birth          to forgive me        when I cannot ask my mother

I leave a child         at the edge of my mouth         dare anyone Wash the moon

clean of the child             and this too is sacrifice and lineage      this too an incision

that made me possible

There’s the kind of person who gives their life              for something

There’s the kind of person who gives their life              to prove there was a life

Despite my best efforts      I keep growing back

Suppose to wash my mother clean         I freed my tongue

of my own teeth

and nearly leapt in front of a train                to save my parents the shame

of knowing I am not as strong as my father          Suppose my mother called

right before      as I worked my knees loose from old transgressions to jump

Suppose only sacrifice staves off sacrifice        What other love is there

Suppose          the alternate ending      the train curves a long moon

I split      I bouquet     I stay         a thousand stains     a thousand cardinals

BIRACIAL GHAZAL: WHY EVERYTHING ENDS IN BLOOD

And what language exists with no word for blood?

What gets across the legend as quickly as blood?

Where I am from there are no words for my shade

Only nicknames     approximations for the blood

Blacktino      Lanegro      Halfbreed   Mutt   Progress

confused     a turmoil of skin    bouquet of hunted blood

I am a burden in every mouth    my name a minefield

people forget what I am exactly     but I end in blood

Two tone sacrament    Where the soil meets the sky

but never the horizon    child with the invisible blood

Like a sunset I am considered most beautiful when

I am disappearing   stitching a gown of my blood

Child with too many tongues    gone twice over

aftermath    a failed experiment of the blood

People ask what are you   and I have no house

I bite my tongue into copper   search my blood

For a key   for a name that is not a translation for

Once there was a war   here is what we did with the blood

THIS LAND IS WHERE WE BURIED EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE YOU: AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CONCEPTS OF OWNERSHIP IN EARLY ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

ABSTRACT:

Within the history of Afro-American existence much scholastic importance has been attributed to the weight of February. This is certainly understandable as Blackness in the pedagogical tradition is nothing if not a silhouette in a pelagic winter. However, understated in all of this is the significance of the “Token” as a kind of tragic hero in the tradition of sole survivors such as Odysseus. More specifically, how a boy might see his undoing and howl across the unflinching snow and never identify the echo. This Sonics of Blackness is a criminally under represented element of how one conveys to a room full of second graders the savage lick of a whip as a means of explaining an entire history. The question of this poem then is how the educator of the classroom approaches the subject of slavery when only one Black child sits in the room worrying at a shoelace, as if preparing. This poem takes as its primary subject a boy no older than 7 embraced by his white best friend as the white best friend states “I am glad slavery is over, I would have hated to own you.” Followed by the boy sitting on his hands until they are blood bulbous and no longer entirely his own. How he looks beyond the window onto the playground and beneath the snow imagines an entire country; beneath that country, another.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS #1

Home field sits beneath six obnoxious moons so you know this is another planet. There’s a field in Idaho where sparrows snap their necks by a combination of desire and proximity. This might be hearsay, but I believe it. The field in Idaho is blue, not the shade of anything you could drown in, but like Blue food coloring, which you can drown in if you try hard enough. All this to say, there’s a football field in Idaho where I heard there’s a man whose entire job is to sweep up little foolish deaths. Their field is not my field, but their death might be my desire. By nightfall there’s so much light, there’s barely a sky at all, I love it best this way. If you think I’m the bird in this scenario, you’re right. Note my desperate not-wings, featherless and stark against the not-emerald. The grass is not grass but if you bow, and you will, your knees ache the same. At the edge of the field there’s a school, at the edge of the school there’s a me. In the road between the two I’m barely visible, a feather troubling a lake. Minnesota is full of lakes, Minnesota is full of cabins, Minnesota is full of lakes whose guts run thick with iron, Minnesota is full of things the light doesn’t have the strength to reach. I lead with my head; I feel my neck warn me. Down the middle of me vertebrae groan into a range of hills the breeze cannot climb.  My palms ripped clean of their soft by the iron of an iron bar, fished from a lake by the beak of a machine. I sympathize with the birds, I mistake things for home all the time. I do not look back; I dive into the boy

reckless for this land

I lower my crown     swear

I will die the king of something

IN A RARE MOMENT OF NOSTALGIA MY FATHER REFLECTS ON OBAMA’S FIRST INAUGURATION

I don’t want to start with the bullet or how you wanted to be president because he was or how in my dreams I can watch the wind surge clean from one side of your skull to the other or how I never wanted you to be president or how hope is its own kind of plague or trepanning or how round rooms make your mother dizzy or how often you forget she has her own knuckles or how trepanning means carving a door in the skull or entrances or broken windows or blood or how much white men hope a well-placed wound can solve or how nobody brings you to god or how only your mother goes to church or how she gripped her knuckles to marble praying or how when he got out of the car your mother clutched my shoulder into a string of bruises or how you have her face or how the skull is a round room or how he got out the car or hope or how I hid the bruises because each of them wore your face         I am saying you looked just like your mother when you were sixteen        you wanted to be president       in my dreams       you are already outside the car       when hope opens the wound       fills the whole round room with blood

TAXONOMY REGARDING MY MOTHER

First Mirror • Love Song on Low Volume • Country Where They Shower Beneath the Moon • Spine of a Rosary • Prayer in One-Part Harmony • Lottery Woman • Dawn Trickling Through the Blinds • Nation of Mourning Palms • Island of Two Countries • Sciatica’s Nervous Civil War • Child of a Rebellious Sea • Vitiligo’s Ravenous Bleach • Country where the Night Bathes You Best • Baptism • My Ignored Phone Call • My Translator for the Dying • My Ignored Text Message • Fistful of White Flags • Abuelita’s Pallbearer • Best Cook This Side of the Trujillo Regime • Candle in an Empty Cathedral • Silk Knuckles • Praying Hands • Moonlight Splintering My Father’s Palm • Love in the Time of Reagan • Here

I THINK EVERYBODY HAS A YEAR THEY NEVER REALLY LEAVE

If song is the yolk of grief, then a year is not dissimilar to a bruise. I come from a thread of tragic men mourning other tragic men. There are men I cannot touch when I need to and all of them are related to me. I am saying that once I was small and this is how I learned my father was going to die someday.

We were in the parking lot outside of Blockbuster; it was raining because I remember it raining; because I am always ready to conjure something to hide my father’s grief in. It must have been 2004 because every station was playing Dance with My Father on repeat. Luther Vandross had a stroke a month before and even the static wept. And there, to my left my father crying and my hands too small to fetch even a single tear.

He asked me a question that was not his question Why does the music have to have words at all? He means that to say the dead will only ever make them dead again. Outside the rain arced out; the widowed strands of a web, silver and perpetually falling. I wanted to strip the words from the air, let the piano repeat until grief exhausts itself. I know only a thin and selfish magic.

Beneath every mention of my father is the only truth he has ever wanted for me. He is going to die and my grief will be unremarkable. He is going to die and he told me so. He is going to die and this makes him not dissimilar to the constraints of a song. Every season dies eventually; this is what makes it a season. I ask too much, I return and return to this space before he could die. I hammer shrinking fists against my eyes, insistent, ugly as the fate of the rain.

SUMMER AFTER

After Gregory Pardlo

The summer after 4th grade

is the same summer I stumble

in on my father watching Purple Rain

for the first time     and I didn’t know

who was on the TV     half as well

as I knew his voice   and I didn’t know

any of the words     and I didn’t know

my father could cry   and I didn’t know

then that my father had lost his job

and would not know for a year

But here     my father eager to hide

his salt beneath his massive hands

hands that are so much like a ship

that has been loved through a storm

or battle leather or anything shamed

by its own softness     until he is the man

I had always known   while I ask him

What are you watching?

he looks at me        and I am small

when he responds

This boy lost his daddy too, but his daddy

taught him the music, now he’s playing

to show his daddy how much he loves the music

And I didn’t have the teeth then to say I was

sorry     I was defined by many openings

and still am      but I knew how to run

up the stairs and grab a stringless guitar

by its throat and run down the stairs

to strum air as I sat in his lap

and turned my face from him

so he could mouth all the words

perfectly

ELEGY FOR THE WINTER AFTER TAINA WAS CANCELLED

In the photograph      which never existed

I am roughly 7

on a block somewhere

near Michigan Ave

It’s worth noting that even

in the photographs

we have managed to save

I look exactly like my mother

save only the skin

We’re outside of an FAO Schwarz

which was a place the other kids

at my school went to buy rocking horses

which cost hundreds of dollars

It’s worth noting that

there is no word for the fear

of waking up white

though there are perhaps thousands

for the fear of waking up with your mother’s curses

Inside       white children are running      as wild as

white children     Bestial with joy

some of them looked like my best friend

some of their mothers looked like a woman

who got mad when I asked her to stop touching me

Lots of people assume my mother is white

that my father       like all Black men

lusts for white women as February lusts

for anything exposed        My mother

is actually Dominican   an immigrant’s

daughter with vitiligo   The only way I know

what she used to look like   a small island

on the back of her calf

I had toys at home       but I wanted their toys

I don’t want to be them     but I want what they have

This knowledge that there is always more of something

I aspired most to be a casual violence

and am still disappointed

I am lucky     to grieve most often what could never bleed

that the blood in my memories is almost always mine

I grieved Taina while I watched That’s So Raven

If I knew anything before it was my time to know it

it is how the static pricked my face to pull me closer

how there were so many white folk on the screen

how easy that sort of famine arrives

how scarcity runs the length of me

how a choice can cost me half my blood

how my mother gave up teaching me Spanish that winter

how scarcity runs the length of me

how scarcity runs the length of me

how scarcity runs the length of me

how there can only be one

In the photograph

which never existed

I massaged the frost

into a mirror

pressed my head too close

to the cold of FAO Schwarz

My face briefly superimposed

on the chaos and smile

think It must be nice

Before my mother dragged me away

and later that night

my father told me I need to stop

talking like a little white boy

And I stared at my hands

and sucked the ash off them

before I headed to my room

which was a good room

And thought of that other city

within my city that window

so pristine it could be a TV

never burdened with static

wondered if the space I rubbed

to look through was still there

My own small brown face

a bruise in the glass

CHICAGO*

I am from Logan Square

in Illinois    there are tornadoes

In Chicago    the city breathes too hard

we make our own disasters

If anything though

I am from the backseat of a Megabus

natural born asterisk

every claim is hesitant

if the bricks cannot remember your face

I am from somewhere

that is not my somewhere anymore

If I know anything it is this

any good survival

tries not to be anywhere twice

I can only sleep on buses

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