S. Erin Batiste

1 poem

Dear Forgiveness, in the Second Year of the Pandemic,
Pantone Announces Ultimate Gray as Color of the Year:

after Katie Willingham

We are here in the twenty-first century and even technology has betrayed

my grief. Over lunch I learn a friend periodically searches Google Earth for

her dead father. There in the network: complicated code and pixelation, he

is still preserved gardening, not left to the afterlife like mine, not unfairly

relegated to a calendar square on an ill-fated commercial holiday, saturated

in candied and neon hearts, an annual reminder his fragile blood pumping

organ failed him. Pantone has proclaimed this year’s color Ultimate Gray,

has granted the general public an appropriate marker, dignity, solace and

space for their private dread, yet there is no announcement, no declaration,

target market analysis, trend forecasting consumer report, color authority

or proprietary shade for: Year of Ultimate Twin Aunt Suicide, Year of Ultimate

Attempted Abduction, Two Years of Ultimate Two Houses Burned Down, Year of

Ultimate My Father Dying in His Sleep, Valentine’s Day, My Aunt Dying, My

Younger Cousin Dying, My Friend Shooting Himself and How We Found Out via a

Celebrity Gossip Blog, My Grandmother Dying As I Arrived Overseas, Year of

Ultimate Garden Apartment Stalker, Year of Ultimate Automobile Accidents and

Uninsured Invisible Injuries, Year of Ultimate Domestic Violence Incident, Police

Report at the Station and Crime Scene Photographs, Year of Ultimate Second Trip to

Planned Parenthood, Year of Ultimate Layoff from Corporate Management Level Role

and Recession, Year of Ultimate Lawsuits and Chapter Seven Filing, Year of Ultimate

Losing Christopher and Hearing He Had a Baby with Another Woman Through Text

Message, Year of Ultimate Undiagnosed Mental Breakdown at Thirty and Selling My

Possessions in Exchange for Carry-on Luggage, Year of Ultimate Year That Followed,

Being Resigned to Silence and Hardly Speaking to Anyone at All, Year of Ultimate

Wrongful Termination Then Eviction, Year of Ultimate Discovering My Sister

Hoarding Exotic Parrots and the Eighties, Year of Ultimate My Mother Threatening

to Kill Me Again, Years of Ultimate Weathering Adolescence and Los Angeles. I have

already lived a personal pandemic, it lasted a decade, it was my twenties.

No one called and no one showed, there was no expertly stylized color

palette expressing a message of strength and endurance, and now I am

bored with everybody else's bereavement and losses. I tell my therapist I

hope they have everything taken so that someone might suffer as I have,

but my feelings are expired, outdated and inaccessible because today there

is language, a container, a color, bandwidth for sophisticated intelligence:

geo-browser able to access satellites and aerial imagery to memorialize their

difficult three hundred sixty-five days, smart machines, devices, tools to

catalog their temporary loneliness, missed birthday parties and girls’ trips,

deaths of co-workers, communities and households down the street,

uncomfortable conversations following unpleasant news cycles, virtual

funerals and Zoom wakes. I tell another friend I think society deserves this

and I do not feel except while watching the latest season of Grey’s Anatomy

Meredith's purgatory beach where she is reunited in weepy episodes with

all-time audience favorites, Derek Shepherd and Little Grey, and if I am

remembering right, her deceased parents, and residents and interns who

marked her pivotal platonic relationships. The primetime drama makes me

wonder who I want to encounter on my metaphorical death sand, makes

ugly crying between my sweats and sheets, tears disappointing to me at this

point. I decide no one. Dear Forgiveness, I’ve lost count of the people I have

disappointed, I’ve lost count of the people I am angry at, who I have

blacklisted, blocked, deleted, and while we're here, Dear Forgiveness, I must

confess how long I have resisted writing you, how long I have stayed in the

seven stages of rage, the mention of your name, syllables, spelling of

loosening, lessening, lifting, letting go angering me. I read online about the

guillotine slugs, Elysia marginata, who sever their heads for the sake of a

fresh body, one without disease of sadness and the past, meanwhile my

dear friend is somewhere strategically planning mailings and trying to

forgive her sick body since she cannot generate a new one, and I hunger to

pare myself free from generational curses, childhood trauma, the ten years

every relative who knew me as a girl spent dying and dying, too many bad

men, and why each holiday is tragedy for my family instead, my resentment

at the TV, how easily simpler women have brunch and belly laughs, cleave

my wrath towards partygoers, those romantics favored for Saturday date

nights, destined to celebrate anniversaries, pray I could reap the parts of

personality which render small talk impossible, somehow cut out all that

melancholy and dark, but what would I have left to show for it, would I

retain this parlor trick of poetry. How if I survived the violence of lacerating

others, then taking the blade to myself, in each incarnation my body will

still remain a middle-aged Black woman, modest, soft, and inevitably tragic.

Dear Forgiveness, do you believe in karma, in everyone eventually getting

what they have earned, given this means worldwide pandemic, is revenge a

gateway drug, are you distant cousins leading us to the same sugar slicked

shack in the forest. Dear Forgiveness, I admit that I hate the slugs, their

capacity for detachment, brave heads discarding faulty hearts and flawed

bodies, their leaving behind for a better version, their ability, and yes, their

willingness to believe a better version. Dear Forgiveness, please forgive me,

because I wish the friend’s father away, anticipate that day seven years in

the future when Google will dispatch its efficient clean energy vehicle to

reshoot the juvenile landscape of the lunchtime acquaintance, how in the

moment she will search as she has always, seeking confirmation, comfort,

or perhaps relief, the blemish of her ghost father perpetually pruning his

peonies will have vanished, computerized mourning replaced by the

updated street view: the glittering new housing development, the glint of

late model cars. I am struggling to forgive myself this delusion, this

contentment in the vision of his shocking absence, fingers frantic, typing

and retyping their address into the search bar. I see her clearly, terribly, feel

my blood rushing warm in speculation whether she will choose to save her

head heavy with yesterday, abandoning her sad innards and muscle memory

beside the now extinct coordinates, hue of her neighborhood amputated

from history, a digital ultimate gray gloaming almost in my imagination.

 

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and author of the chapbook Glory to All Fleeting Things. She has received fellowships and generous support from PERIPLUS, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Poets & Writers +Reese’s Book Club’s The Readership, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. Her Pushcart nominated work has been exhibited in New York, is anthologized and appears internationally in Magma, Michigan Quarterly Review, and wildness.