Copyright © 2016 by Aaron Coleman
Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press
Minneapolis, MN 55403
http://buttonpoetry.com
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover Design: Nikki Clark
ISBN 978-1-943735-06-8
For Lew
Table of Contents
Viciousness in Ends
St. Inside and Not
Vestigia
Manmade Shelter Beneath Rupturing Sky
It is not a question of memory
On Acquiescence
After
Her Song a Cliff a Cage
Rich
Sta. Soledad
Where We Choose to Hide
*
God’s Island
On Forgiveness
Through
Between
Wherein I am
St. Seduction
On Surrender
Seed Beneath the Dark
Elegy for Apogee
[American Dream] See
St. Trigger
Notes
The pure products of America
go crazy—
—William Carlos Williams
Viciousness in Ends
blood and trust in my mouth
on the ground sweltering each
swing harder dizzy still to protect what?
inside red and black gloves with quarter-
worn knuckles part of a man two fists thick
no way to know the stranger from my
brother’s hand – the boxing glove still hot
past it sticky hand slipping into –
we refused to go the fear in our throats –
stuck like meat in our teeth and it was good and it was
from one another and sweat genesis and took
uncut grass we laughed face down
in the yellow to press each other’s necks like dull blades
and used our forearms – where he breaks
we laughed because we swore a man is born
into each other’s sharp backs point blank
we shot the metal bb’s we shot
the metal bb’s point blank into each other’s
sharp backs because we swore a man is born
where he breaks we laughed and used
our forearms like dull blades to press each other’s
necks face down in the yellow uncut grass we laughed
and sweat genesis and took from one another
and it was good and it was stuck like meat
in our teeth the fear in our throats – we refused
to go past it sticky hand slipping
into the boxing glove still hot from my brother’s hand –
no way to know the stranger part of a man two fists thick
with quarter-worn knuckles inside red and black
gloves to protect what? each swing harder dizzy
still on the ground sweltering blood and trust in my mouth
St. Inside and Not
Being tornado, being wind-stuck,
Being swamp-swallowed and forgotten, being
Gangster-gone-ghost. Being leaking
And prohibited. Being rugged
Smirk and gut exposed, stone church
Roof removed, ivy-spindled throat. Being
Forever-far from coasts. Being echo clang and
Shale-sick grease rag. Being trundled down
The conveyor belt the wound wound river being
Time-tight, squeezing and seething
And flooding. Being burnheart and holy
Jelly Roll squall and squalor and
Ma called squaw battered in missing shame-
Laden eyes. Being missed and called family, anchor,
Surname: Gone. Being turned into translation,
Being an altar and a mother praying God save
Me in a language I’ll never know. Being hands
Held high above head, body blown open. Being
Bit-nickel never trusted, being
Runaway sharecropper castrated, burned
Away in pieces in hand-licked heavy
Envelopes. Being letters scrawled: you
Missed a big, fiery one. Wish you were
Here. Being midnight ripped
Off the face of constellation. Being
Rage shattered in the body, before
Each risk: live, let die, follow.
Vestigia
The trees teach me how to break and keep on living. Patience
and nuance and another kind of strength. That kind of life
wrought from water and mineral iron and loss, the perpetual loss
that emanates from underneath tongues, leaves. The hush splayed
across the jungle made of memory. More fearful for its lack
of movement. The sad lusciousness our eyes reason from a world
on pause. Motionless green. What we touch and see, immediate as
steam, then gone, collected. Tense, wet beads full of secrets; how
to make a branch long. Nothing swaying the weight of the trees.
Manmade Shelter Beneath Rupturing Sky
I can’t tell you, but you feel it the way you feel
thunder. The way it speaks rain and beckons
a turning back to manmade shelter beneath
a rupturing sky, a silent please between
men who work to claim each other, blood,
who are supposed to take, to prove, to dig wide
around what burns and not speak out
loud about love. Fumes fuse when we
hide words under eaves like bushels of wheat
and watch the barn burn down
as the rain picks up too late. Boys burn down
and aim to take the town with them. Flames flick light
into pummeling rain, billow black smoke when they break
open the cans of tractor grease. You won’t let yourself
look away from the burning shed as the structure tears
down in cindered shards of darkness
in the middle of the storm, the middle of the night.
It is not a question of memory
Frost, inexplicable in a mirror like a river
muting my reflection, I see trembling
southern fields, clouds clotted with
shine. Body, still wet, covered
in cold, where the South hides. I
run water over fear, a descant
for recollection. A slow drip down
this nose, lips, chin, down, through
the shoal of impulse and each
border of this torso, scar-laced hip,
belly, thigh, shin. Beneath. My South
thick with pulse. I’ll flux into
history, but first let me fuse
language, anguish, touch; give me time
to settle with what anchors shadow
to this face this morning. My South:
both gulf and border, black highways
stitched and caked with rock salt,
the corpse of a red-tailed hawk, swollen
then frozen in ice, now mid-thaw
in the cattails, a sandbar eclipsed in
the stench of sulfur, and my remaining
barefoot in autumn on a man-made
beach, Lake Michigan, even after the wind
picks up. A dozen monarch butterflies
strewn like candy wrappers in seaweed
washed ashore, somehow so close
to asphalt and fluorescence; an iron
city’s core. My stark hand damp,
tracing the warped wooden door, South
still staring back through the asking
mir
ror, back through the memory
of a trip South I’ve never taken before.
On Acquiescence
Of Bronze – and Blaze…
We were crossing town again, on the bus. Our point guard who
could never sit still, be stilled, said, Playin’ with my money is like playin’
with my emotions, between his teeth and leaned into the aisle
mimicking Big Worm’s anger we’d watched on TV. My teammate
and I shared more than the same name. All of us slapped seats
with laughter, barely understanding, on the bus crossing town in
ties and slacks, heading to our JV game. After school but before
the game, I had wanted to say, don’t play to a girl I smiled with
too much in her white-on-white volleyball knee-highs and skin,
down in the empty afterschool classroom, both of us too
silent, looking at each other as if lost in the angles of skin and hips
and dusk. Careful games shrouded in change, wanting. I was never
quite sure about her touch, metal-detecting fingertips seeking
shrapnel. We held something quiet. We crossed town, got off
the bus. Chins up, another contest, away. Rarely smiling. Undressing
and changing into uniform I remembered her hands, put mine
where she put hers on my body. A boy said, And you know this, man.
We laughed and talked shit when what we wanted to do was
understand. I remember the fists of the boy with my name when he,
hotheaded and light-
skinned, cut across the court, breakneck toward the white
man hurling slurs from the front row of his son’s home
game, 4th quarter, seeing a tall, blonde boy – maybe his –
knocked onto hardwood. The perennial black versus white school
rivalry. When my name streaked toward the bleachers cross town,
reaching for the screaming white man, our black feathers rustled
like midnight peacocks claiming our cage, the polished floor.
We were cross town. We were off the bus. We weren’t safe.
Not while playing away or sweat-soaked inside
patent leather Jordan’s, toes clenched like talons, cursing
with our bodies under the buzzer’s horn, straining to empty
what gets stuck in hands fashioned into weapons that clutch
torsos and throats hummed in muscle, flexed shut. Off
at this distance, I hold less and less noise and more silence.
But what if we are made of this violence?
After
I lock a foreign door behind me, leave her
sleeping. Three days wordless and now
I will not see her more. Her. And will never see
You. By and by. We: fragments of you. And I am made
by loss. I may never love, hear, and know
the child with the mind I had before. You were us. Now,
exits and entrances, muted corridors cut
through an end inside, spiraled blood and dark—
I know a quiet, but don’t know who or what
you were, I am, was. I slowly break a giant
lotus the color of rain cloud with my mouth; stray
petals, forgiveness, saliva
inept along my lips. Echoes: a shrill woman breaks
her voice over my body, scowls before she pleads
with the walls I’ve cobbled into me. A young, tall preacher
in his prime smiles, mouth closed, and
places faceless coins
in the deep palm
of my left hand. The bent wire
grip of the lantern I don’t want
creaks sharp in my other hand, thin glass lets go
tattered streams of light, ill sway, insignificance,
absence, beneath raw white sky. This snarl of intuition,
a clutch of sudden roots, believes,
but does not speak. What I remember is everything, but
I know that can’t be.
Her Song a Cliff a Cage
How did it end up in that house. Hand-forged
burl and bole and shoulder. Figure sheathed
beneath cloth. What sunk and became
the room. What was draped and standing
taller than this woman who made the woman
who made me known. Restless wire sacrament.
A hole made of music comes wide, inhuman from
a crooked instrument, a torso almost hollowed,
rimmed in shades of pink and ivory. Nothing
black about this anchor. Beyond memory, she touched
its strings, spilled improbable sound. I will
always be a child to that harp. Confused.
Never allowed to touch. A deafening gleam when
its music moved through lightless rooms, through
walls and bodies alike. I became silence. I’ve become
cumbersome as love I cannot hold. Then let me be
that music that consumes midnight. Let me make
chords with what comes from this blood.
Rich
rich (→) adj. 1. Having abundant possessions and especially material wealth: As in, standing a breath between each other, she didn’t realize how rich she was until she saw him weigh her past in his eyes. 2. a. Having great worth or value: Remnants of his mother’s voice echoed beneath their praise, inside his spine: we may have enough but we ain’t rich, at least not like them; don’t forget your hands are broken mirrors, how they splinter moneycolored clouds. b. Made of or containing valuable materials: It wasn’t their new world’s prospects that changed them: they’d become rich with what they’d lost, and because of what they were losing; you could tell by the way it swayed their frames, curved their minds. 3. Magnificently impressive, sumptuous: Despite the flitting birds of his new money and tongue, his deftly rearranging mind, it was true she was the rich one; he forced himself to keep his gaze above the ground, open on her eyes. 4. a. Vivid and deep in color: They were the rich amber of dark honey unbecoming itself in green tea. b. Full and mellow in tone and quality: She only hesitates because the touch of his voice feels rich as music at the edge of her body, rich enough to coax home a ghost. c. Having a strong fragrance: Her rich scent carries something with it, or in it, not only her but something coming through her, running. 5. Highly productive or remunerative: Their gods said, what you share won’t make you rich; what will you do with the coin of your lives? 6. a. Having abundant plant nutrients: They buried their gods in rich soil, then searched for months on hands and knees for warmth radiating from the surface, eager to reap the unwild. b. Highly seasoned, fatty, oily, or sweet: Their myths, their histories, their pleas, their systems of conviction and logic; they were too rich to not be poison. c. High in the combustible component: As in, beyond their own rich bodies, they could sense a hiss coming low, too, from their world, willing to explode. d. High in any component: So they grew, or swelled, guilt-rich, shame-rich, and ever-teetering at the cusp of knowing so. 7. Highly varied, developed, or complex: It was the simultaneous intimacy and distance, the real and unreal sense of their lives, their relationships, their auspices that felt so rich: so profoundly yet elusively interwoven. 8. a. Entertaining; also: laughable: But there is something rich here; even—or especially—for them, bearing witness to the near emptiness, the falling. b. Meaningful, significant: As in, something rich enough to let slip less and less slowly. c. Lush: She said, you know, the same way a certain, pluraled pain is rich. Yes, he added, or a certain pluraled crisis. 9. Pure or nearly pure: Though they thought they were, they were not rich enough to go.
after A. Van Jordan
Sta. Soledad
Especie de dios, que no me toques donde me queda
The crescent ache that meets the light
And blinds my failing eyes that work
Crisis, aun vol
uptuosa, en contra de cada cuchilla de momento, cada década de
Desire tumbled down, ripe with what I won’t admit I love
Each prayer of breath and touch sliced open not enough
Cuando nos dejamos extinguidos, más torcidos que juntos, pero así fieles
To the black hole heart not greedy not lonely
Only doing what it is supposed to do: claiming
Como la material que somos, hinchada con Gracia, llena del fin tanto como lo abierto
Where We Choose to Hide
It was absolute. It was gorgeous. Stay.
But gorgeous. Trust. The cold bending. The light
from the cathedral. Snow in our lies. The frost—
seething. Slowly, slowly into summer. How we were
wrongheaded and heavy with music:
its strange weight. Pulsing, heart-like.
Loss-like. The brutal conviction of seasons.
Blunt nakedness. Sweat-lush
5100 blocks south. Dusk-swept, swallowed in
skyline. If not a horizon. We can’t—
your eyes. Lake dark, wide