Home in the Universe

Hold a pomegranate in your palm, imagine ways to split it, think of the breaking skin as shrapnel. Remember granada means pomegranate and granada means grenade because grenade takes its name from the fruit; identify war by what it takes away from fecund orchards. Jontae, there will always be one like you: a child who gets the picked over box with mostly black crayons. One who wonders what beautiful has to do with beauty, as he darkens a sun in the corner of every page, constructs a house from ashen lines, sketches stick figures lying face down- I know how often red is the only color left to reach for. I fear for you. You are writing a stampede into my chest, the same anxiety that shudders me when I push past marines in high school hallways, moments after video footage of young men dropping from helicopters in night vision goggles. I want you to see in the dark without covering your face and carry verse as countermeasure to recruitment videos and remember the cranes buried inside the poems painted on banners that hung in Tiananmen Square— remember because Huang Xiang was exiled for these. Remember because the poet Huang Xiang was exiled for this: the calligraphy of revolt. Always know that you will stand nameless in front of a tank, always know you will not stand alone, but there will always be those who would rather see you pull a pin from a grenade than pull a pen from your backpack. Jontae, they are afraid.

children must be in that birdless city.

Long ago I gave up singing to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled. One night I will say to it: Heart, be still, and it will.

Bullet Points BY JERICHO BROWN I will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it To get home. Yes, I may be at risk, But I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will Do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we've been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can pay a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.

I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my children. You are not my blood anymore. I give you back to the soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped my brothers and sisters. I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving. I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close. I release you I release you I release you I release you I am not afraid to be angry. I am not afraid to rejoice. I am not afraid to be black. I am not afraid to be white. I am not afraid to be hungry. I am not afraid to be full. I am not afraid to be hated. I am not afraid to be loved. to be loved, to be loved, fear. Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire. I take myself back, fear. You are not my shadow any longer. I won’t hold you in my hands. You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart my heart my heart my heart But come here, fear I am alive and you are so afraid of dying.

Genial poets, pink-faced   earnest wits— you have given the world   some choice morsels, gobbets of language presented as one presents T-bone steak and Cherries Jubilee.   Goodbye, goodbye,                            I don’t care if I never taste your fine food again,   neutral fellows, seers of every side.   Tolerance, what crimes are committed in your name. And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,   blood donors. Your crumbs choke me, I would not want a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped   by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never   falter: irresponsive to nightmare reality. It is my brothers, my sisters, whose blood spurts out and stops forever because you choose to believe it is not your business. Goodbye, goodbye, your poems shut their little mouths,   your loaves grow moldy,   a gulf has split                     the ground between us, and you won’t wave, you’re looking another way. We shan’t meet again— unless you leap it, leaving   behind you the cherished   worms of your dispassion,   your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous,   wry-humored balanced judgment, leap over, un- balanced? ... then how our fanatic tears would flow and mingle   for joy ...

Yesterday evening after what is called porch fest, while I sat on the porch with Wingyi and chatted with two people she knew, a man came by, holding a bundle of lit incense, looking not at all distressed but focused, intent, and definitely in a different plane of knowing. Let’s tell halloween stories, he said. I said I don’t think I know any, uncertain of whether I was open to this exchange, holding back in that gut sense of maybe this person will make me uncomfortable, or ask too much of me...No, he said, just two words: “A bat.” That’s a great halloween story, I told him. He continued on, words that became poetry, words strung together, drawing on some inner logic. The computer... thinks the calculator is a computer. But the calculate thinks the computer...is a computer. Halloween stories. He walked away after that. Hey you take care, I said. And thanks for the poetry. 

Do not think I am not grateful for your small kindness to me. I like small kindnesses. In fact I actually prefer them to the more substantial kindness, that is always eying you like a large animal on a rug, until your whole life reduces to nothing but waking up morning after morning cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.

Peace.

Home.

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead are dead. I hear the witch's cry break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards. Her tongue shrivels into gas . . . Now, far from women's arms and memory of women, in our father's hut we sleep, are never hungry. Why do I not forget? My father bars the door, bars harm from this house, and it is years. No one remembers. Even you, my brother, summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant to leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you. I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln-- Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there. Am I alone? Spies hiss in the stillness, Hansel, we are there still and it is real, real, that black forest and the fire in earnest. 

Kill.

Lawmakers Lawmakers Law. Makers. Lawmakers.

I was glad I stopped.

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   Down the ravine behind the empty house,   The cowbells follow one another   Into the distances of the afternoon.   To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines,   The droppings of last year’s horses   Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/16/i-have-wasted-my-life-2/

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