Pardon My Heart

Pardon My Heart

by Marcus Jackson

Overview

Winner of the 2019 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry 

Pardon My Heart is an exploration of love in the contemporary African American ethos. In this lyrically complex collection, the speakers and subjects—the adult descendants of the Great Migration—reckon with past experiences and revelatory, hard-earned ideas about race and class.

With a compelling blend of narrative, musicality, and imagery, Jackson’s poems span a multitude of scenes, landscapes, and sensations. Pardon My Heart examines intimacy, memory, grief, and festivity while seeking out new, reflective sectors within emotion and culture. By means of concise portraiture and sonic vibrancy, Jackson’s poems ultimately express the urgency and pliability of the human soul. 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780810136915
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication date: 04/15/2018
Pages: 72
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 16.70(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

MARCUS JACKSON was born in Toledo, Ohio. He earned a B.A. from the University of Toledo and continued his poetry studies at NYU and as a Cave Canem fellow. His poems have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Tin House. He lives with his wife and son in Columbus, where he teaches in the M.F.A. program at the Ohio State University.
 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

Pardon My Heart

Pardon my heart if it ruins your party.
a good deal to drink. It's a pretty bad dancer—too much feeling, too little technique.

It may sing some godless hymns, about ousting armies of loneliness, about marching

victorious to wives and towns beneath a heart-colored dusk. Pardon my heart

if it closes its eyes for hours,
Pardon my heart if it laughs too loudly,
too ardently. Pardon my heart if it rests an arm across you or your friends' shoulders —

touch allows my heart to trust that it's not imagining your company's loveliness.

Pardon my heart if you have to kick it out.
the lights to tidy, my heart will ignore and keep doing its little two-step, aglow

in the middle of the room, never happier to have nowhere else to go.

Paradise Skate

Friday nights, we waited in a loud line for the door's push bars to unchain,
Bass

We saved up for old
of subwoofers, amplifiers
music's bass would shake
the comely blades
shake our origins'
If Only

If only I could sing like Marvin,
Even When Spilling

I've got to do something with all this longing
To the Love Gods

Thanks for those first dearests who left us for flashier suitors.
When in Love

You're a drooling fool — you've got a mouth full of diamonds, and you're smiling.
When Out of Love

You're a rowboat at the center of a desert. You're tongueless and all your words blur.
Convalescence

The finest part of losing a fistfight occurred the hour after, assuming you had a girlfriend to go to. She'd sit you on the bathroom counter, she'd cotton ball Neosporin to your bashed brow, your split cheek, your lip like a scrap left over by a butcher. Her hands would weigh no more than birch leaves; her exhales would sweep your ears like wind through creek weeds. From a radio,
Dominion of Men

In tenth grade, I knocked out someone twice my age and weight — Larry, a veteran with a wrecked knee, who begged my friend and me to taste the spicy joint we blazed.

Larry could usually be seen on a lawn chair,
a joke that spurred Larry to an anger in which he called us niggers and began swinging his metal cane. I threw a left-hand straight that popped open Larry's cheek; he dropped

and bled heavily. For weeks, my buddies spread tales of the triumph to everyone,
who'd racked up enough petty wrongs to earn a defeat from a skinny teen.
his name underscored by the chiseled words SOLDIER, FATHER, BROTHER, SON.
Eventually, those fists could win him entry into the strange dominion of men, where faces grow grim during stories of love, and where faces become bright throughout fables full of pain.

Best Men

to Jeff

Our voices used to be squeezed baby toys.
Baby Boy in the Back Room

While a weekday party grew in the front of a foul flat, you slept in a car seat set upon a mattress that had no sheets.

You dreamed, and your young mother drank a quart of malt, and she wouldn't smile until a foam halo lay at the bottle's base.

Tunes with curses in the choruses boomed;
and stepped close enough to hear the ricocheting breeze of your breathing.
for your safety, or for the knobless door to somehow slow down all the ugliness building beyond. I chose only to crouch,

to kiss your head's tender top and return to my pint of rank wine, my cigarette left balancing on an upturned beer cap,

to one night in a great array of nights when we hid our hurt and mistook the world for an ordeal no father could make gentler.

CHAPTER 2

PART TWO

Evasive Me

Of course there's a certificate, bleeding carbon at the creases and impressions,

detailing my metrics and lineage the night I entered the earthly air in a new hospital

built by the intricate partnership between Rust Belt governance, capitalism,

and Christ, though I lie to people I like,
the sea that my mother—multilingual and remarkably tall—rinsed me at the fringe

of the tide the morning after labor,
while the sand whispered spells of protection,
and amidst this farce my dear listeners don expressions of distrust or ire

as likely they should, faced with evasive me, so wearied even before boyhood

by the truth that I've forever disallowed my ears and my mouth any songs not made

from the water, dirt, wind, salt, and fire of American manipulation.

Lullaby

to Jessica

Fighting with Mama, Dad shattered a lamp, slammed the door, and headed to the Ottawa Tavern. Mama took you from your rickety crib, and we both sat on her lap, as she smoked and hummed in the unlit kitchen. Her Merit burned on the glass ashtray, while Dad arrived at the pub where the barmaid knew what he needed before he spoke. What was Mama thinking,
Off Camera

There remain some black-and-white photos of my mother, snapped the August she left for college. She's wearing a dark, long-sleeved

velvet dress, half an oval cut between the shoulders, showing her clavicle.
of some woods, daylight leaking through the leaves.
vulnerability. She was soon to begin studying acting—at a school with touted teachers, a city with buildings that took

steel bites of sky. In this shot, she peers off camera as if, at sixteen, she already sees the brutal plentitudes waiting to break her.

Ashtray

Filling with my mother's smolderings,
One More Tiny Thing, 1985

Auntie kisses each dying catfish before cleaning it. Lots of small, gold eggs fall from the sliced gut of a female (a bullhead Auntie caught herself). Her man labors home,
Alternate Take on Autumn Beginning

I think of the bald practice field, of rehearsing the playbook's blueprinted collisions,
Armor

I stood in my underwear, the iron clicking toward readiness. In yesterday's slacks and wifebeater, my dad smoothed a leg of my Lees on the timeworn pressing board.
Sweetest Day

The student body government sold dollar carnations in the cafeteria.
Crack Cook

On a triple beam Shaun stole from our school's chemistry room, soda-cooked cocaine weighed to exact grams. His mother waitressing at a twilight diner, and his toddler sister drowsing in her crib, Shaun chopped product on the coffee table, cautious never to waste a grain. He reveled especially in the venture's finer details: his phone's endless trembling; the feeding of folks who woke to tongues as dry as baked slate;
Goodale Park

A hunched man speaks Korean to the geese,
Full-Time Driver

I took every hour they offered, delivering lukewarm pizzas by means of an '86
Woman in Secret

My cousin eight and I five, he led me to a gutted Econoline, propped by cinders in a neighbor's side drive.
(Continues…)


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Table of Contents

Part 1

Pardon My Heart 3

Paradise Skate 4

Bass 5

If Only 6

Even When Spilling 7

To the Love Gods 8

When in Love 9

When out of Love 10

Convalescence 11

Dominion of Men 12

Best Men 14

Baby Boy in the Back Room 15

Part 2

Evasive Me 19

Lullaby 20

Off Camera 21

Ashtray 22

One More Tiny Thing, 1985 23

Alternate Take on Autumn Beginning 24

Armor 25

Sweetest Day 26

Crack Cook 27

Goodale Park 28

Full-Time Driver 29

Woman in Secret 30

Part 3

One Touch 33

I Don't Do This Much, But 34

Again 35

Same Room Some Nights 36

The Former Us 37

Separation 38

Travel Plans 39

The Crown Inn, Washington, D.C. 40

Disregard 41

First Warm Morning, Amsterdam Avenue 42

Mollified 43

Project Courtyard 44

Harshman Painting 45

Longing for Before 46

Part 4

Pitiful Prince 49

Edenless Us 50

Staying In 52

They'd Rather Go Blind 53

Daybreak 54

Ring Buying 55

Connubial 56

Homage to My Wife's Hips 57

Her Hair 58

Suburban Nocturne 59

Solidarity 60

Dark-Eyed Heir 61

For Tonight 63

Acknowledgments 65

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