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.