her uncle with death if he didn’t leave, too.
They took my great-grandfather’s store & land & home &
Uncle Sugarpie was a nice man but rocked
on his front porch chair with a shotgun if he saw
any white men walking the neighborhood trying to sell
any damn thing. What else can we do
for protection? I think about that in the ecstasy
of a sweet peach & irony of death & theft of indigenous
land & the violence of language in every space
I enter & I think I am losing everything but my mind.
I certainly am paying for the trouble
& we split all that liquor so now
our whispers mean to get loud. Yes, now
you have to listen, or move the hell out of the way.
EPILOGUE FOR PERSONAE
We came to the past, at night, in some future access point,
Moonless. We hold no blame
For attachment past attachment’s end,
We show up to show how we arrive—
A path to lose our sense of others
We came to paint neon text
On a black wall with a ten-foot paintbrush, rhapsodic
We came to find out when molecules touch & almost react
We came to approach green with shaped blue or flood
The field pink, its shapes folding, the page weight
Undoing weightlessness, opposites
Allowed to oppose in peace,
Reflective counterpoint
Imagining
I SLEPT WHEN I COULDN’T MOVE
Black girl, black girl
Don’t lie to me
Tell me where
Did you sleep last night
—Leadbelly, “Black Girl (In the Pines)”
I slept in my own bed in need of replacement
I slept sitting up against a steel bunk in Illinois winter next to military strangers
I slept beneath a run of pipes on a destroyer & I slept with a failed guitarist
I slept on his brocade couch in the Valley & left before I could remember his face
I slept in the deepest part of Watts
in my lover’s grandmother’s house
with a view of an abandoned lot overgrown with weeds & drug trash
He kept his mouth persistent & unfamiliar
In a dark turn I slept in a bathtub dispossessed
I slept with love & treated myself to unkindness
I slept after repeating myself alone & I slept in a friend’s guest room with a broken window
& listened to nameless strays killing what they eat it’s hard work
When I was small I slept with three sisters the same size in a house with the gas cut off
I slept with a man who hated himself & we slept in a beautiful bed in a loft with a downtown view
& he brought me red wine & cold water
I slept happily in hotels when I could escape
I slept in a mountain cottage & wrapped myself in a crocheted blanket & sorrow & wrote poems about
my animus
I slept on the floor in my father’s house I never slept in the brick
one-story my grandfather built & sometimes I feel like concrete
I slept in the palm of my own Black hand
I slept when I couldn’t move
I slept in a place that hadn’t been built yet & dreamt the sheer violence of the future
I slept inside a song with a Blacker voice than mine which meant I slept good
I slept in the orange light of day silence
I never slept on the street
I slept in the knotted hair of my sister’s children in Detroit & washed & combed it in the morning
I slept when I couldn’t move
I slept in a California desert, free of bodies & trees
I slept in senescent lake muck
I slept through earthquakes & El Niño & never stopped traveling
I slept in my car on the side of Fountain Street at dawn & my car shook from the traffic but I worked all night & couldn’t wake up
I slept in a rented studio apartment in Brooklyn with roaches & the aroma of methamphetamines
climbing through vents & under the door & dreamt about work
I slept to the repetition of Cesária Évora
I slept on a feather bed & let myself dream a cracked blue
I slept in a red dress & sparrows woke me in the morning
I slept in a black dress & saw a hawk in my grandmother’s magnolia
I slept in my beauty & in sleep I knew that beauty as inheritance
couldn’t be stolen or strung up or caged or appropriated effectively & it’s mine
& what I have to own I have to love it
I slept where I was born & a rude wind pushed me into exile
I slept in the infinite arrangements of Prince’s instruments
I slept out of dreams when cranes cut the sky in an era of smog
I slept in San Joaquin farm country & there were too many kinds of molesters
I slept when I couldn’t move
I slept in on a Sunday next to the radio
I slept crying every night for a year when I failed at my best thing but I kept him alive
I slept in a world I forgot to love sometimes
I slept as if I still believed in rescue
I slept expensively & poorly & middle class
I slept when I couldn’t afford to
I slept in stolen freesia
I slept for a moment in snow & reclamation
I slept in Hejira & wasn’t cruel when I slept
I slept in kinship with my faults
In a dream I was hopeful & slept when I needed a radical silence
I slept next to a man’s portrait with someone else & more than once I didn’t close my eyes
I slept in a lie & the comfort felt so real it was real
I slept as if I were years
I slept so many years I couldn’t find
In sleep my eyes dreamt the nearness of waiting & couldn’t touch it
I slept in the clues I couldn’t wake from
I slept in hidden cameras & microphones
I slept in secret & in public
I slept so sure in a used place & so anonymous like womanhood & so hypervisible I slept in a kind of fire & became it
I slept in a place of brilliant bones & the future of Blackness
I slept in a system outside of every law but one
I slept when I couldn’t move
I slept in a simple way
I slept in a place just for us
I slept where I could see it
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Lamar quote is from the song Alright; the Glissant quote is from Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing; the Carson quote is from The Beauty of the Husband.
“In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die” appears in Boston Review’s chapbook, Poems for Political Disaster (2017).
“Double windlass,” “Ut pictura poesis,” and “Ancient mother I keep teaching us new ways to find joy” appear in Inverted Syntax (October 2018, January 2019).
McMorris is a reference to Mark McMorris, particularly his grid poems in The Book of Landings. Mothlight is a 1963 short film by Stan Brakhage.
The Poetry Review (UK) published “Live unadorned,” “Something about the way I am made is not made,” and an earlier version of “Anodyne” in Autumn 2017.
“Monologue for personae” and the other personae-titled poems are after Fernando Pessoa, Lucille Clifton’s “the message from The Ones,” Robert Hayden’s American Journal, and Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence.
“Dementia is one way to say fatal brain failure” was written after reading the official language around Alzheimer’s disease and dementia—the reductiveness and violence of the medical terminology adds a dehumanizing dimension to the already difficult process of understanding the diagnosis and its real-life ram
ifications. We all lose when we are failed by our healthcare system and the language it uses to describe us and our bodies.
The erasure poems and poems with italicized text are culled from various guidebooks, dictionaries, random thrift store paperbacks, and unfinished poems.
“Ode to 180 pairs of white gloves” is after Lorraine O’Grady.
“I dreamt you at the Tate” appears in The Rumpus (April 2019).
“Declination” appears in New Delta Review as “Notice” (Spring 2019). It is after Bernadette Mayer, written as part of a Midwinter Day writing group organized by Becca Klaver.
“If gold, your figure as mirror on the ground is” appears in Poetry (October 2018).
Nine poems, including “The world says not to expect the world,” appear in The American Poetry Review (July/August 2018).
“Ode to the accuracy of intuition” is after Martha Rosler.
“Common miracles” is after Bebel Gilberto and Wendell Berry.
“Double life” is for Erika.
“I slept when I couldn’t move” appears in Tin House (Summer 2019) and is after Alice Notley’s In the Pines. It also meditates on so-called conversion disorders that can occur during fibromyalgia flare-ups.
My deepest appreciation to my steadfast friends, family, University of Denver cohort, colleagues, and literary community: you know who you are, and I could not do this without you. Endless thanks to my sister Kim, for asking to hear new poems, for listening to this work all the way through—I love you. Thanks also to my teachers, editors, and writing compatriots, Dr. Tayana Hardin, Eleni Sikelianos, Matthew and Tin House, and to The Grind Writers Group—a treasure. Thank you to Ariel Robello, Monika Woods, Kima Jones, and Allison Conner. Thank you to my students, for your understanding and for the challenge.
KHADIJAH QUEEN is the author of Conduit, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, Non-Sequitur, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Colorado at Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the low-residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
Copyright © 2020 Khadijah Queen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Queen, Khadijah
Title: Anodyne / Khadijah Queen.
Description: Portland, Oregon : Tin House, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004299 | ISBN 9781947793804 (paperback) | ISBN 9781947793903 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3617.U443 A85 2020 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004299
First US Edition 2020
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com
COVER:
Romare Bearden, Untitled (Woman with Flower), 1969. Collage on Masonite, 23 5/8 × 17 1/2 in. (60 x 44.5 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of anonymous donor; 1976.52 © Romare Bearden Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY