1 poem
Imprint / Untitled / Notes in Relation
—humans
emerge from cement beams, flail out into sun,
hum emptiness like flies, and burdens, bottoms of shoes
all contaminated. Surfaces lie, steel distractions, distorted
visions, the reflection of one’s face on a subway pole. I’m far
away from it, tucked in, writing from bed, blue sky, dead obligation
on my tongue. I can still taste it. Isn’t that funny? Zurita burned
his face with a branding iron. When we itch, is what that says.
I
squint and see into –
not sure – all the things I’d thought I’d forgotten…
Relief in not being stranded in a queue,
catching another human’s skin fragrance, little invisible particles
of otherness entering the nose stream, their peculiar grief
of living.
All around us decay. We can’t smell it,
the white mills,
white air between us.
Pretend we exist.
Try language, try excessive sweetness.
No names for things.
No names for phenomena.
Wound gathers around borders.
How long can we live without a body?
Once, the body, once its spiked desire.
“Because” was a way of linking relations between occurrences,
to say the broken foot was accidental, for example. Reasons,
in addition to Reason, inert, dangled at the ghost mall.
The pattern of discipline no longer wears the face. Is simply
a way of organizing time, which was a fiction before,
now become edifice. Because we are a people, we used to say,
structural diagramming was to determine a set of appropriate
movements for our comings and goings.
Delirium of crux.
Central cavity of a divide that swarms
the body’s guts. Elsewhere, corporeal men made to eat at each other’s
necks. Hundreds upon hundreds—a caterpillar, iron in the face.
Think of other body-rows, other shit and piss baths. Think of
acquiescence. Now think of the stratosphere, of being slightly beyond.
I’ve been given a life to carry around and nurture its preciousness,
to say “me” and then to look out and see there’s nowhere to
go. I remember the way California holds itself
distinguished in elemental cacophony. Things just glow. Even
there, a cotton wad filled my mouth, went all glut from
misuse. Hey, firestar, I used to say, come on over here
and let me walk you, and the answer was mostly, yes.
And, to exist is what it has always been: a woman lounging on a velvet chaise or a woman doing someone else’s laundry [figuration], a boy with a bag, etc. America cannot distinguish certain urgencies from faith. Drones overhead dumping nothing into nothing. How to enter belief? [A quest] A dissident reaction. I have said “everyone” but I’ve meant, “a few.” I have said “chaos” but I meant “catastrophe.” The whole nature of loving another person. I have said, “everything,” but really, the poem is meant to register the particulars: these pants from Anthropology like black balloons. There’s a black man on my street walking with a bat and safety goggles, his little white poodle trailing behind him. The first touch in a dark bar hallway, just the right pressure, a voluptuous sinking. Narrative, right out the window if there could be a window.
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems including Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.