#litribune

A new poem by Bonnie Jo Campbell

I am walking, because it still comes to me this need for distraction. Claude and I used to walk on porches the customers came outside. We were part of something the even animals understand part of our own guilt perhaps, but really just selling crack. Art depends on distraction to survive, whenever I dropped in the hard way to Benton Harbor and scored heroin I felt a cleaving in my brain and couldn’t make it fit until the fix came. The patrolman’s speeding car and red and blue scream striving for the same scene of distraction like William Carlos Williams “great figure” distracted Charles Demuth. The other day a car was t-boned by a van and splattered into a telephone pole. A fire truck was there, the jaws-of-life, a soft place they might die on. I saw a young friend’s soft plave, hunkered over a bath tub after chewing fentynal patches like bubblegum. Claude’s soft place came with a heart attack in prison, but he still visits in dreams and we were driving once again on 94, when he asks, “you still on h?” I reply, “no,” and I feel the way Mercedes felt when she said, “it’s good,” while I brushed my fingers the exact spot of her forehead where Alice Notely’s Alma feels the dead rush of heroin pour through like a black fuck air of carbon monoxide carcinogens. Traffic is a distraction, a broken god, fixed only when accidents occur and the distraction is turned into broken. A shank of the night, frozen wordlessness on a stretcher, some silence, some zone of grace. That would be a start. Not dead but damn well broken.