“Khadijah Queen’s poems are fire and sacred song. From heart-stopping familial narratives—a son awash in sadness, an aging mother’s boulder-smiting love, a brother turned to dust by a bullet—to formal inventiveness and experimentation, this is writing that makes the hardship of being alive transcendent. These poems swirl the pain of our lives with a neon kind of sweetness. Queen’s writing endures the revolt of the body with verbal play and a powerful, radical vulnerability. Anodyne is urgent and fragile, manifesting the beautiful danger in being alive.”
—ALEX LEMON, author of Another Last Day
“Anodyne captivates with poignant, resilient poems; ones that face toughness with lucidity: of losing family and facing landscapes full of ‘untended loveliness of the forsaken.’ All of which builds an affective and luminous sense of record, of observing and perceiving. The poems speak to ‘How we fail is how we continue’ and construct insight with breathtaking momentum through frank, sonorous, and delicate diction; furthermore, the poems carry forth an analysis from the person to the systemic, recognizing and remembering ‘when pain was not to be seen or looked at, / but institutionalized. Invisible, unspoken, / transformed but not really transformed.’ The poems are full of a vital and recuperative prosody: erasures, odes, synesthetic centers; Queen’s commanding style: building the poetic edges that are laced with endeavors, hurdles, grace, and truth into an eye-wide and powerfully deep poetry collection.”
—PRAGEETA SHARMA, author of Grief Sequence
“Khadijah Queen’s newest collection, Anodyne, is a study of form & cavedwell, feminism as foresight, and archives the articulation of black excellence & resilience. This is the complexity fans of Queen’s work have grown because of. How she shapes each poem to the sound of a hand, photograph, fractured reflection, and a throat. Anodyne as a noun is a painkilling medicine. These poems are a painkilling medicine. They provoke, incite, and steer steady as scripture. Each meter is breath, each beat encourages reassessment by the reader unto themselves. Who we be beneath the dust & dust & fallen arches of our name? Many (re)discoveries are assured with the preciseness of Queen’s poetic legend.”
—MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, author of Black Girl Magic
“Khadijah Queen is a brilliant poet. I recommend this book to anyone who ever had a child or a parent, who ever had a body or loved, to anyone who was ever sick or tried to sleep a good night’s sleep, and failed, and tried again. . . . This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience. Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.”
—ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic
ANODYNE
KHADIJAH QUEEN
for Kim Smith—
for your brilliance & enduring belief
CONTENTS
In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die
Of all the things I love
Erosion
Double windlass
Live unadorned
Monologue for personae
Copper men
Something about the way I am made is not made
Dementia is one way to say fatal brain failure
I have a method of letting go
A tiny now to feed on
Horizon erasure
Ut pictura poesis
X
The rule of opulence
Antediluvian
Sestina for personae
Sky erasure
Synesthesia
Ode to 180 pairs of white gloves
I dreamt you at the Tate
Retreat
Reclusionary
In the quiet
Declination
If gold, your figure as mirror on the ground is
Eclogue for personae
The world says not to expect the world
I watch exact in disconnect
Ode to the accuracy of intuition
Precipitation erasure
Anodyne
Imminence
NJ Transit passenger ode
Ancient mother I keep teaching us new ways to find joy
Afterlight erasure
Common miracles
I watch the endless breakage of wings
Route
Double life
Epilogue for personae
I slept when I couldn’t move
Notes & Acknowledgments
Painkillers only put me in the twilight
—Kendrick Lamar
We know ourselves as part and as crowd,
in an unknown that does not terrify.
—Édouard Glissant
Wasn’t it you who told me civilization is
impossible in the absence of a spirit of play.
—Anne Carson
IN THE EVENT OF AN APOCALYPSE, BE READY TO DIE
But do also remember galleries, gardens,
herbaria. Repositories of beauty now
ruin to find exquisite—
untidy, untended loveliness of the forsaken,
of dirt-studded & mold-streaked
treasures that no longer belong to anyone
alive, overrunning
& overflowingly unkempt monuments to
the disappeared. Chronicle the heroes & mothers,
artisans who went to the end of the line,
protectors & cowards. Remember
when pain was not to be seen or looked at,
but institutionalized. Invisible, unspoken,
transformed but not really transformed. Covered up
with made-up valor or resilience. Some
people are not worth saving, no one wants
to say, but they say it in judgment. They say it
in looking away. They say it in staying safe in a lane
created by someone afraid of losing ground,
thinking—I doubt we’re much to look at,
as we swallow what has to hurt until we can sing
sharp as blades. Aiming for the sensational
as we settle for the ordinary, avoiding
evidence of suffering at all costs, & reach
clone-like into the ground as aspen roots, or slide
feet first down a soft slope, wet, cold—but the faith
to fall toward the unseen, the bleak of most
memory—call it elusive. Call it the fantasy to end
all fantasies, a waiting fatality, blight of both
education & habit. Warned inert,
we could watch ourselves, foolish, lose it all.
OF ALL THE THINGS I LOVE
My son wants to leave, depression making
talk of permanent exit a habit. I make him
laugh, a temporary stay, spend every penny
I have to keep him in the comfort and joy
of computer games and good eating—his idea,
anyway, fried and meaty and overdosing
on pancakes and Golden Oreos and steamed
chocolate with whole milk. I don’t drink much,
but I want to. Since last summer the Woodford
only halved. Why can’t I be myself in this world,
over and over he asks me, knowing I’m powerless
everywhere except home regardless of what I say.
I would move the fucking universe for you, I say,
as many times as I have to, and we both know how
fragile my body is compared to my mind. My energy
never stopped fueling two. He likes to humor me.
He knows better and has the scars to prove it,
but he believes I will try, having never seen me give up
without a fight that ended in the wreck of someone else,
even if it cost me, too. Sunlight debilitates him and night
keeps him angry awake. How do I tell him that I’m tired?
&
nbsp; EROSION
10 million years casts any movement as given. Grand Mesa—prone
to rockslide but craters at Dotsero stay young. Once,
lava flow took a mile of highway, stretched out its red heat & black
smoke rising grey to white, no lake, crawling baby of magma
& water. When snow-topped, both still boom with basalt.
That molten underground we swim the surface of.
In Palisade the low range casts no shadow over the vines, peaks
rising inward as separate entities, stark high earth and low-height
green. Road dust cradles the ground. I go there with a friend
A drink in the evening
becomes two, laughter then a free confession overlooking lavender
fields—man-made, another desert verdanted, in which one person
admits they are precious enough to hide—the night brings out
hunters—intoning survival in that shadow, blink of life in swallow
& vapor, body ever in revolt, a red centimeter of a mouth
asking what else. How we fail is how we continue.
DOUBLE WINDLASS
after Pizarnik & McMorris
under volcanic
moonshadow
double twilight
took
the honeycomb
infatuates
city moss
in lateral sail
chapels
bees
grotto—
whitelit
invocations—
on dawn’s
broad summit
a glad populace afar
a whole-mouthed
sea
LIVE UNADORNED
Turn the wake
Identify a new habit
in progress a good succulent
in a sea of smooth pebbles
A sky can be grey
even in a warm
off-season
In defiance of time
the smallest people dance in it
naturally
They want to
have the last sound
MONOLOGUE FOR PERSONAE
Disguised as an I (no direction)we say:
Hello, disarray. Soft hip abridged, subaltern superstructure—
We came to exist in apparent psychological systems
We arrived starlit, not dust-borne, ending in decayed light
Under certain circumstances, we sit in drawings
like some old sir, as cold as refusal, wingless.
We came with merchant discipline. Light with stealth, in our anti-prime.
Implicit: private rages to thwart
most paramount wants, sultanistic
without asking, outside time, inside unknown
epochs. We created ourselves out of
parking lots, an organized chorus repeating I want to go home
In varying intonations, with variant urgencies,
we came to (no direction) the opposite of illusion
We came to silken the asterism
We came drunk off sea liquor to unravel threads of flesh
We came to be shaped, enough repetition
We came to be in flux, unnamed, then pronounced by care
We came to have our newness used up by the wrong power,
We came to be tucked back into embrace
We came to shutter the past in our ignorance
We came to shutter the past in our enlightenment
(Black box / Red chair / Red flowers on a table,
dead or alive. Some spiraling of strange light)
COPPER MEN
As an afterthought
bring you bent wires to
cuff your small wrists.
Think delicate bones
under soft flesh when
it dawns in some far
latitude where you are not
forgettable yet. Accept
every offered scrap—
talk, metal, touch. Exchange
twisted infinitudes learned hard
ways, flake & tarnish.
For the next artisan, you
forge a mulish silver
preference—by no known
means compliant
SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY I AM MADE IS NOT MADE
to make sense—I stretch my insides
across pages until my pain is upside down. Peonies &
tulips bloom red & pink from my back,
bent like washerwomen’s knees—
full-on shadow. But I could have neon
feathers if I wanted—faux
apparatus of flight. I could have cultivated in error
the bad luck of odd numbers.
Spectators claim
ancestral innocence, as ever—a suit
two sizes too small for escape & inside the coveted
dance, I first look down at extraneous steps
in shame. For all my notes
& vices, I still long to stop the false
fight for my humanity, en masse, allowed to share
a history of anything but suffering
DEMENTIA IS ONE WAY TO SAY FATAL BRAIN FAILURE
Whose mind loses when
the loved decline.
Human by whose degrees. Capability
and refusal twined up in
loose fog, time-shocked. A body is what
without its engine. How do I let go of my mother
before she is gone? Predator grief doesn’t watch,
like a real apex. We slow-feed that wraith. Viscera.
I HAVE A METHOD OF LETTING GO
Asthmatic child in a house full of smokers, I crawled once
under toxic clouds to find my mother
I was so brave I almost died, or desperate
I wanted her more than breath
I was so small & she could sing
anything alive, almost
She didn’t really know, doesn’t know now—
She is familiar with duty & made me so
I can’t live on that loss
In 1977 a bullet turned my brother into dust
His 18 years here, an invisible talisman we hold in our callous living
Sometimes I think my mother smoked to pretend to breathe him in
A TINY NOW TO FEED ON
So clear the heart after
the unreal takes up—
I’ve not learned
what to sew besides
more, other scars—
how to live exuberant with settle
too much room
underneath skin feels like crossing
to stay golden Seconds wasted
count as wanting, preening
o reactionary
hushes, mean illusory
I held close or trashed
in fear The Great American terrain
I can’t carry without my spine
—gold rings, bare wrists
weakening at pressure
points I don’t tend often
enough. I take all
A break is just the space
between a cutting,
my skin holds, try not to
think about withering, a potion for
whatever you don’t want—belonging
in failed ways,
failure meaning a field
wrecked by birds
or a field meaning nothing.
If in the air, believe
In my body pitch
selfishness as religion Devotion at least,
knifelike, everything else abraded,
even the sky, that sear
HORIZON ERASURE
Blue-grey braceleted Hollow
torrent threat
comes on cloud shift. What about letting go
Ivy clung to passageway ceilings, some grass on
shoes Untied
Blood moon
tried to take my son
Stop refusing to understand
UT PICTURA POESIS
How do I fancy a good atonement Homebound body
so slow to bounce back from overuse, meaning, darling,
A cuff of immensity threads me— centrifugal
I could fragment thus a rifle shard in a blood flick, dew
perched upon arrival
Where travel is a future &
not such arts
as ordinary inheritance azure mass—explicit menace
in a wing lull I try not to take
My mother, grandmother for granted
& not their elegant fierceness in flight—How do
I resurrect the excised archive of my relatives
How to use the word
love, mean it my animal glow—sacred rot
This luxury of time to even ask:Who were they
X
In Blombos Cave an etching—
a cave of swimmers. a lake of sand dunes. in every rock a green