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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810136342 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
14_1 (Fourteen)
You don't know what an unreliable narrator is,
Moebius
I'll tell you all my secrets.
not because my father has his face;
I once loved math: the balanced equation proved destiny, justice, romance — but I got caught in the brambles of language and now I have to make my own sense.
Today I soaked and cooked pigeon peas,
My friend once concocted this dish for a lake woman from Michigan.
as the globe that taught you where you come from. I don't come from there, or here, this Brooklyn building of brick, smoking spots, bike racks,
and a full-color block print tag that says MOEBIUS on one wall.
Why didn't that happen? Was it my skin?
If there was a day I learned I was black,
I didn't know the work. How heavy to haul those ingredients home.
Caldera
Eight hours standing, stocking beer coolers before the local men shuffled in after work,
I turned my back to town and walked along stone walls studded with hibiscus and palms,
Building the Quabbin
Because strangers in a city miles away thirst,
The water's clear as air.
it took seven years to unmake,
all the way up, droplets trilling,
14_2 (Fourteen)
The past is a horror story still haunting the present —
Necropolis
Out of town, down along the cliffs and walls sunken in surrounding earth.
Ahead for miles, the villages, farms,
A switchback path led me down among trees, where darkness pursued its thousand shadows.
Two women took admission.
Up a little hill,
lanterns of a kind. No,
gave easily. Elsewhere,
More orbs dangled above me,
the mounds of grasses, weeds,
Down, and the grass brushed my knees.
The tombs were measured,
spider's web splayed in a corner.
Each small and careful cove impressed the air in its own way,
They look like benches in a sauna,
but the silence? But the silence.
and birds' eveningsong above,
as I leaned my head into the archways of tombs and saw darkness.
In some, the structures of barracks or bunkers lurked.
from the opposite wall. I made out plants, ferns curling, feathered strands groping the stone towards earth.
But in one doorway, looking in was like going blind.
So I looked at everything else:
I found traces of writing chiseled into the stone. Clean.
processional
he lifts my grandmother's body
a sheaf of reeds he picked himself, cattails rustling in the wind
he carries her as though he meant to make something useful, to weave a basket,
this is what they mean when they say good man: they mean a love strong enough to smile as though he could lift her anywhere,
with my father and the other white-gloved men.
14_3 (Fourteen)
They call you Steadwell, after your older sister. The kids who know you from elementary school. The gym teacher who warns you, smiling, sharing earrings transmits AIDS, who says seated ladies cross their legs. None of them tells you the why
Sakura
Sculpting cherry blossoms reminds her of home,
threading, twisting copper wire through rose quartz.
flowers storming the Tidal Basin,
dissolving on an outstretched tongue.
In the Ordchard
Because I was told: in countries I don't know there grow orchards of apples ancient and wild,
because the sun was so intent on me the summer ruby millipedes marched in armor around the roots while I harvested reptilian avocados,
because I watched him breathe one afternoon, his arms flung back in the daffodil glow of my room,
I know one reason it hurts so much to live:
When the Man Talked Around Me, When He Talked Over Me
Then he became a fish swimming backwards.
In the world of men, I sewed my tongue into a stone and grew small. It was how to survive. I removed vertebrae as a parlor trick. I sawed off my feet and sanded my limbs down gradually, an inch or so at a time. I whittled my breasts and hips away. I sewed my tongue into a stone where it shriveled and curled, desiccated, the frond of a fern. Soon I was so tiny, I could be carried around in a shirt pocket. Food costs were down. But I wanted to be smaller still. I wanted to pass through the eye of a needle. Before long, even atoms loomed over me. I was good at my job. Very good at my job. You'd be surprised how easy it was.
14_4 (Fourteen)
It all goes down in the cafeteria, the warehouse where throngs of wild children congregate,
Cafeteria Tech
The woman we ignored as kids, except to mock the curious hairnet
in a straight horizon line — or frowning with resolve, never unkindness —
as angels (if not as good) — she cared. She nurtured us, rough and small.
The Woman Pouring Handfuls of Ash
isn't the title of a painting by Vermeer,
it's only me dumping a cache of cigarette ends
in the trash.
smoked them until red singed the root, watching
a canal of white Midwesterners herd small dogs,
monster strollers,
My teacher once asked me,
although it's clear anger owns a warren in her too,
that the feeling is as home to her as honey.
She could tell.
ask for it, I don't say.
it's strong, bitter beer that's steeped inside me years.
Dark nights I want to stalk bars to find somewhere to
pull blood from the mouth of a fool
of a man bigger and slower than I am,
crush the seeds of his teeth against my bones.
I long to tear this world apart like rotten fruit,
starting small.
I measure the distance between
the edge of the bar and the skull of a stranger.
I watch myself reach for the bottle I'll crown him with,
violence as proof of survival. My teacher asked to see
if I knew the truth:
If it helps,
count the number of bullets lodged into the faces of buildings, the skin of furniture. Measure the trajectory and fall;
If rewinding helps,
to watch the flower break loose from the man, collapse, the torn ecosystem of skin and neuron,
Our inevitable endless dead echo and echo again.
14_5 (Fourteen)
Shelley struts the blacktop trumpeting not guilty! the day the Simpson verdict is announced. Black people win for once,
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "All Blue So Late"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press.
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