4 poems
Shoveling, or Winter in America
~after Mrs. Brooks & Gil Scott-Heron
We learn from your mistakes, even if you don’t fight
Fair. We’re neither the diviner’s scrying mirror first
You divined, nor the devil’s door. Forced open now & then,
We slake the blame, wail in your project hell, fiddle
Tunes of victim hoodwinks & blues-tinged metaphors, ply
Your bell jar with daddy experiments gone awry, the
Fall imminent for all ussin. We narrowly escape slipping
Past your Svengali grin, dismissed like second string
Bit players. C’mon, gimme some! you bark, with breath feathery
As whitleather each time lips part. Honeychile our sorcery,
We crimp/walk on your amour fou for brown flesh, no muzzle
To mask your incestuous predilections. (Now hooooold the note!)
Whiteness cannot save the soul of America. Lies made myth with
ProRegressive repetition forever enslave. As your fathers’ hurting
Hanker leads, you charge. We, pens shivs steady, await, love.
I Held Hope in My Hand
& then I dropped Hope, dropped
the slip of paper gifting Hope
to anyone who needed to tear her
from the wall in the clinic surveilling
those living & loving with the scourge
of living & loving with cells wiped clean
by pills. I dropped Hope by accident.
I’ve never been intentionally reckless.
I swear ’fo’ God. They’ll tell you, too.
They saw each tongue yapping its
languid, foreign language on my flesh
& orchestrated it all, according to Their
perfect sequencing of pareidolias, right?
Instinctively, I rushed Hope
to rescue her from the open palms
of leaves autumn had grounded for being
the bad girls leaves can be, stomata all open
& tantalizing, just waiting to be gathered,
piled, renamed, & sold to keep men’s gardens
properly mulched, but before I could arrest
her little cells, the wind kissed Hope,
& she blew from that hand to the curb
before circling back into the other hand,
the one you say I shouldn’t speak of
anymore, because you think me beautiful
& more than that. But how could I not speak
its beauty—how in its inability to grasp
a thing, its excrescence held onto Hope,
kept her tangible —&, yes, Uncle Jesse, alive—
if not felt, since the hand cannot feel
anything nerves disclose—pain, heat,
objects that men’s malevolent minds
fashion to pierce. But for a moment,
this misshapen mound, firm as a boulder
over a cave door you see blocking your way
into the depths of the something-more
you want here in this poem gave Hope
something Faith, Love, Peace, & Courage
—all huddled on that wall, waiting
to be wrested & useful—cannot live without:
the masquerade of It gets better with #TimesUp.
See, I, too, sting, America!
Then, I slipped Hope in my right pocket,
where she’d be safe & in good company
with all I’d need to conquer the day: pens,
the wallet of cards that make me
a compliant capitalist, all the keys,
keys, keys my overpriced degrees
afford me. Knowing Hope was there,
t’was easy to ignore the sleights &
entitled white cats blocking my path,
the I-didn’t-mean-to-offend-you hollowing
their vacant stares. Then, like clockwork,
Agent Orange tweeted some affront
to all grammarians & advocates for
common sense & human kindness &
I went foraging. I needed to
look Hope in her cataracts, savor her
smize. But somehow, in keeping track
of all the distractions, Hope had fallen out.
It’s what I deserve, I tell myself, too free
as I was to pay attention to her crying out
as she drifted to another tom’s back door.
Guess I’ll go back to Absolute Care,
genuflect before that wall—built
to protect paying patients’ privacy,
of course—& cleave another piece
of Hope. This time, I’ll put her
in the pocket next to my heart, where,
I’m certain, she’ll go untouched.
look away, look away, look away …
In the Cat’s Cradle, An Embrace
I am such a weepy bastard. Nothin’ but the dog
In me, Uncle George mewed. Since I’m a cat man,
I recall what MaMary taught me. A hit dog will bark,
She said, & yet I run over puppy dogs’ tails
On a daily basis, don’t look back as they howl.
I can smell their mange a block away, & here I am
Itching. Beloved, your kitty Noma loved me more
Than you did, & I loved your kitty more than I loved
Your cat, which you loved a lot. You leaned
On your counter & writhed without me once
While I watched, ate the bread you’d baked
& thought, This is how loving yourself tastes.
I sit in this stuffy office in a chair whose back
I have broken, surrounded by the backs
Of two other chairs I have broken & a leather bag
Whose zipper is broken because I carry too much
Litter on my back, which was millimeters away
From being curved enough to require a brace.
Wouldn’t you know? I was disappointed
About that news. There’s only so much this bag
Can take, son, Cat Daddy said on Christmas Day
As he thrust its patent slickness into my lap, grinning,
Which is ironic since the man who says he’s afraid
Of nothing said he once jumped to the top of
A barn’s heap of hay to hide from a feral cat. Said
I got to go feed my cows when I said if God hates fags
He hates me. There’s only so much this page can take.
Loving our selves is hard work, so don’t cry out loud,
My pretty. Don’t be like Grizabella. Her pain never
Sounded sincere to me. That’s why I couldn’t shed tears
For her. Or you, ’murica! (Cue “Memory” here.) You
Sons of bitches & toms & hairy queens: Get thee hence
& don’t forget to swallow your hair balls. I’m a gib, dawg,
A gimp, dawg. Stand clear of the door to what’s left
Of this barn this year’s storms have raided, dawg, or I’ll
Scratch your back, & you’ll scratch my patchy mane, &
You’ll love it. You’ll be itching for the rest of your lives.
PrEPositions*
Lodged in the back of my throat, held as tightly
As the slack of a man’s johnny-come-lately soul I sup
To the quick, make thicken, & dissolve into the symphony
Of my selves sieved & open, I implore you, O friend I refused to take
Inside for years. O to see your wonders performed, how trill the sound
Of my perfidious blood honeydewed! Look at us & marvel
At whose we’ve become: Big Pharma’s sugar mamas hankering
For daddies’ diamond DNAs unfiltered. I’m always dropping you
In sentences these days, with a question mark, as I whisper to you
With the same breathless assurance I want to give my every corpuscle
To the ones who choose tenderness when most herald Savage. Woke. Petty
af on the online market to the highest bidder. It took years
Before I realized I’d forgotten to let you in, forgotten to say
With with in tandem in a last will, in a love letter I’d left
To the flesh of my flesh not-yet-birthed into this nation
In which I call our clan’s father lit & beautiful.
For he is, so much so I would cuss God & dye my soul blacker
If I could. If I could, I’d sing my selves happy, kissing every crater
Of our fathers’ fathers’ father’s pale face, kiss his woman’s lips, too.
For this slave wrote us a love letter once, when she spied a glimpse
Of our bicontinental future body-bagged. Who can sing thy force? she extolled,
With palms outstretched. Imagine that! O bittersweet pill we take & feast
Upon where’er we go so that no one sees the secrets we carry
In our pockets now. Squares that we are, we’ve swallowed hope & shat fear
Of the truth we know: We are so good to gather. We do the police
In different voices, too. Our self hoods & hoodies, our woadies wildin’
Upon the dancing machinas of our woulda coulda shouldas, our shekinahs
To a glory made whole. By you. We’re so pregnant—thanks to you—
With possibilities. Let us swallow our souls’ salvation, commence
With this born-again Earth’s new covenant. PrEP, are ye the way of the Lord?
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*Originally published in now-defunct online magazine HEArt.
L. Lamar Wilson’s poetics appears in two collections, Sacrilegion and Prime; the stage production The Gospel Truth; and the film The Changing Same, a Rada Film Group collaboration. He teaches at Florida State University and Mississippi University for Women.