The Dead Eat Everything [1 ed.] 9781612777870, 9781606351895

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t h e d e a d e at e v e ry t h i n g

Wick Poetry First B o ok Series david hassler, editor The Local World by Mira Rosenthal

Maggie Anderson, Judge

Wet by Carolyn Creedon Edward Hirsch, Judge The Dead Eat Everything by Michael Mlekoday

Dorianne Laux, Judge

maggie anderson, editor emerita Already the World by Victoria Redel Likely by Lisa Coffman

Gerald Stern, Judge Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Judge

Intended Place by Rosemary Willey Yusef Komunyakaa, Judge The Apprentice of Fever by Richard Tayson

Marilyn Hacker, Judge

Beyond the Velvet Curtain by Karen Kovacik

Henry Taylor, Judge

The Gospel of Barbecue by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Paper Cathedrals by Morri Creech Back Through Interruption by Kate Northrop

Lucille Clifton, Judge Li-Young Lee, Judge Lynn Emanuel, Judge

The Drowned Girl by Eve Alexandra C. K. Williams, Judge Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia by Lee Peterson Trying to Speak by Anele Rubin

Jean Valentine, Judge Philip Levine, Judge

Intaglio by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis Eleanor Wilner, Judge Constituents of Matter by Anna Leahy

Alberto Rios, Judge

Far from Algiers by Djelloul Marbrook Toi Derricotte, Judge The Infirmary by Edward Micus Stephen Dunn, Judge Visible Heavens by Joanna Solfrian

Naomi Shihab Nye, Judge

The Dead Eat Everything  

Poems by

Michael Mlekoday

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio

for my mother, my father, and Grandma Toni

© 14 by Michael Mlekoday All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013030410  978-1-60635-189-5 Manufactured in the United States of America The Wick Poetry Series is sponsored by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mlekoday, Michael, 1985– [Poems. Selections] The Dead Eat Everything : Poems / by Michael Mlekoday. pages cm. — (Wick Poetry First Book Series) ∞ Includes bibliographical references.  978-1-60635-189-5 (paperback) I. Title. PS3613.L36D43 2013 811'.6—dc23 2013030410 18 17 16 15 14      1

Contents Foreword by Dorianne Laux  vii III. Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular  3 Dictator, by Which I Mean the Mother Brandishing a Pistol with a Piñata over Her Head  4 In Minneapolis, My Father  5 Self-Portrait, Wearing Bear Skull as Mask  7 First Plague  8 Self-Portrait, July  10 The Novelty Doorbell Turns Prehistoric  11 Forage 12 Home Remedies  14 Self-Portrait, Downtown  15 Baba Sits You on the Kitchen Table and Teaches You All the Old-School Curses 16 Self-Portrait with Pollination  18 Going North  19 Genealogy 20 Self-Portrait, Fat Tuesday 22 Departure, the Path Back Puddled Over and Darkened 23 Don’t Ask Why I Stopped Believing in Magic 24 III. Self-Portrait with Blight 29 III. Playing Dead Means Different Things to Different People  39 Self-Portrait from the Other Side  40 Flood 41 Self-Portrait with Power Outage  42 Self-Portrait with Big City Religion  43 To Vanish, Cover Your Eyes and Count  44 The Motherland  46 Self-Portrait Wherein Everything Whirrs with the Spirit  49 Self-Portrait, after Drive-By  50

Bobby Hasn’t Eaten in Three Days  51 Cartilage, Cartilage  52 Elegy on Old-School Drum Machine  53 Thaumaturgy 54 Drop 55 Maker 56 Self-Portrait, Kneeling  58 Acknowledgments 61 Notes 63

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F or ewor d b y d or ia n n e l au x “There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.” —Dostoevsky

Yes, wow, this Michael Mlekoday is the bomb!! And what a dynamic reader! I went online and watched a few of his YouTube videos and he is also one hell of a Spoken Word poet. This makes me feel good, to have found someone who needed finding. There’s so much out there in the Spoken Word world that’s just, well . . . and Michael tosses that all aside and says Listen, this is art! This is poetry, not just words thrown together, not just ideology and hot button stuff. This is the deep, deep world bubbling up from the molten core of the self—rich, dense, lush, but also lanky, loony, and wholly original. I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Michael’s book was just un-ignorable. I was hooked as soon as I read these lines in the first poem, “Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular”: O window, come again in glory and the block will put a piece of itself through you, makeshift spear to the side, stone to the back of the skull, thunder of gunshot. Here, we all know that sound. We all know that sound, especially Americans who have grown up with the noise of guns, and breaking glass, and dogs barking and babies crying for hours without end. Maybe this is why we make so much noise ourselves, to cover up those other sounds, the music of our violent lives. Mlekoday’s melodies are woven into his lines, each taking us somewhere unexpected, to places and people foreign and familiar at the same time. And there is so much movement and life in these poems, so many switchbacks and hairpin turns, such swerving, so many hands reaching out, so many smashed noses and mouths and fear and Spam and vodka, bricks and blood, goons and gods and greasy burgers. Devushkin, Dostoevky’s main character in Poor Folk, is struck by a quote from a style manual

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which becomes for him a kind of manifesto: Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror: it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document. This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet’s life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking right at you, daring you to eat the whole thing.

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I. My target audience is dead folks: ancestors, martyrs, ghosts in your headphones. —Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W i t h Gu n s h o t V e r n a c ul a r All summer was one wet weapon after another: barb of sweetgum in the ankle, stranger’s knife blade, the wasp stuck in your sneaker. Rainfall kept the crack addicts asleep in the church basement amid remnants of the broken window. O window, come again in glory and the block will put a piece of itself through you, makeshift spear to the side, stone to the back of the skull, thunder of gunshot. Here, we all know that sound. If somebody flinch at firecrackers, they may as well mispronounce your name. This place is old as a mother tongue. Here, the world is always saying Ya mama, Ya mama, and you write poems like they brass knuckles or empty 40 bottles of O.E. Believe that. Believe in wildlife, that snarl and sex, glimmer of I, I, until death. Most people stop believing in lions after visiting the zoo, but you seen too many broken locks and this neighborhood is bordered by a jawbone made of light. Rhyme or die. Shoot or die. Smuggle yourself out like a banned book or die. This is the voice calling to you in the wilderness, its dark milk like blood in the throat.

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D i c tat o r , B y W h i c h I M e a n T h e Mother Brandishing A Pistol With A P i ñata O v e r H e r H e a d Everybody had a grandparent who was a communist or bootlegger or inventor of flammable doilies or connoisseur of bloody bird feathers found in the yard, right? My grandmother was once a bride teetering on edges and edges: high wire above alligators, high wire over immobile infants, electric fence during power outage, altar rail, train tracks separating bad neighborhood from bad neighborhood. Dress in the mouth of a dog. Mess in the house of a hog. Dziadek moved south mostly for the fog he saw in a photograph, one he lost soon after taking from the first wallet he ever picked. It was thick as current running through wet skin. There is a town in Poland where every house silenced by a suicide gets its front door painted black. Elsewhere, they bury all the dead with music boxes. Here, we do nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe we forget to walk the dog. 4

I n M i n n e a p o l i s , M y Fat h e r watched a crew wipe the family name from the face of our supper club. The new owners slapped a cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him, either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lot toward a greasy burger joint or he is on his deathbed and I still don’t know if he can hear me. His lungs, like voices in bars, grow louder over time. Once, drunk, at dinner, he said: If only we were more like the dogs, we could smell Death’s haunches, we could whip the flies with our ears. He went from his mother’s house to the Army to his wife to his mother’s house again, and then she died. He watched his old supper club transform, like a summer afternoon into storm, unrecognizable, hail blinking off the roof

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and disappearing. Nothing broken, everything changed. The bridge across the river collapsed before he did. The laughter that came from him that day did not belong to him. If I tell him Father George is on his way, if I draw a cross on the hospital room wall, if his breath can’t fog up the window. Once, in his first apartment, sober, he said: We are dogs, I can’t stop licking my lips.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , W e a r i n g B e a r S k ull A s M a s k The world looks like fangs. You look like fangs to the world. Everything is quieter so you shout, slang and other language coming out warbled and hungry as a barbed arrow. The world does not care what you eat so long as it is not them, but motherfuck, they all look ripe from the inside of a mouth. The mouth is a cave and you are the fire within, or you are the cave painting, the ghost of something slain by something larger, or the mouth is the scope of a rifle and you are a boy away from home. You are a boy in the shape of animal and in the dark everything feels like the woods. The sweat, the fresh smack of spring brings blood to your face but you are still just skull and imagined claw to the world, just the dumb perfect body of death. You stopped speaking long ago. You haven’t eaten yet today, and the world looks bright as winter.

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First Plague The autumn my baba built her house into a church, the floods rolled in like a Cadillac, tinted and ominous, sloshing never-ending down the block as slow as a real-life disaster. An asp wrapped itself around her ankle. She stomped it hard, humming out of key like a great choreographer. That year, she’d seen a man break into the neighbor’s house with an axe. That year was the year after she started praying again, knelt before the bathtub gin. Seek Jesus nose-first with a blindfold, she said, palming the liquor to her face. Those were the hands she once used to prune the flowers, the flesh now loosened, the flourish now diminished. The floods worsened, like a pit bull chained for months then unchained. First, she dragged the bathtub to the living room, the claw-feet scarring a path through the house. Then, she stained the windows,

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painting three of her favorite saints with large mouths and varicose veins. She sat at the organ in the corner. We filed in, water up to our knees.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , J ul y Fresh water is to salt water as— fuck that, I grew up in the inner city. Halal meat markets are to blades what we all are to blades: methodical and ordained. The first time I had a gun pulled on me was not the only time, but I still don’t believe in sleepwalking. Just once I want you to wake up on a bridge. Just once I want you to kick a door through its frame and watch it fall drunkenly into the other side. I told my sister yesterday Goddamn, I know it’s stupid, but I miss this neighborhood. She looked at the least lit edge of the skyline and said Yeah, that is stupid. But the difference between stupid and ignorant is in the last two digits of a ZIP code and I drink on both banks of the river. East is the kind of drunk you feel in your porch light. West is chasing your pit bull who is dragging large pieces of the porch on his chain, asphalt wrathing the wood to its core. Just once I want you to bite, to shred your knuckle in the weight of daylight, to know your body by the names it calls itself.

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T h e N o v e l t y D o o r b e ll Tu r n s Prehistoric Then came the winter that all music was too loud. I helped my father move to a high-rise apartment. Whenever we turned the radio on, the noise came hot and apocalyptic from the speaker like a slapped cheek in public. We staggered back, ended up unplugging the damn thing. Passing cars rattled the building, game shows and montages were unbearable. The new organist refused to play at Mass, at Baba’s funeral. He hadn’t slept in weeks, he said. His dreams were too loud, though otherwise pleasant enough. My father looked for answers, but he’d lost his Bible in the move, had only a hand-carved portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary from Poland and a notebook of all his old lottery numbers. He paced between them all season, looking at neither, hands clasped. We managed to drive by the old house once. Its new occupants were waltzing in our living room. Picture frames were falling to the floor.

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Forage A way of life without wattage or Formica. Have you ever been lost? I crossed myself daily like a basement mystic, oiled fingers, old fears. I hated. I hunted for that new car smell in every can of SPAM, every sloppy pear I swallowed, all the nights spent fending crackheads away from my porch. My, my, my porch & block & last light bulb outlasting even the fruit flies & their sex. They gathered like every surface in the ghetto was a church. Christ was a pest. Every crucifix I saw lost its hands. I chanted fist-first until I measured my blood in buckets. Forage. I have skinned a house of its front door in search of the meat inside. Forage. I have skinned the animal I found in me & watched him wrench himself

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back into the flesh. I have made gods of my skinned hands. I, all thirty-two teeth of me, yes.

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Home Remedies Baba once cast a demon out of my brother. She slapped him hard across the face and left a glass of vodka on the kitchen table overnight. By morning, the glass was empty and the rainclouds hung fat and fanged over our block. Whenever it stormed, she tongued her dentures out of her mouth and sucked them back in, staring out the window, and crossed herself, cursing under her breath in Polish. .

She taught us the old curses and the blessings, brought us to the cemetery to practice both. I was always better with the curses. The way they had to be dragged from the body, the odor of sea salt stuck to the breath, how they kicked the heart like the pop of a burnt-out bulb.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , D o w n t o w n We left because we were lost and broken. The sun rode us like donkeys. Our hooves turned colors in the dust. Shush, you said, every time I dropped a mirror and it broke into song. It’s the only way I could see myself in fragments, which I think is how the earliest surgeons studied before cutting. Where were we going? Maybe the woods, maybe Detroit. There’s a way in which the thick skin of air in the woods hangs like sweat in the inner city. I’ve mistaken drops of air conditioner exhaust for rain while leaning against apartment brick, watching a fistfight bloom in mid-July, the highway humming in the distance like the time you kicked a hive and smiled. I lied. We didn’t really leave, and broken is just another way of saying we left shards and splinters of ourselves everywhere, like kids trying to leave a trail back home. We’re still here, right here, and here, this debris makes the street glitter like a river.

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B aba S i t s Y o u O n T h e K i t c h e n T a bl e A n d T e a c h e s Y o u All T h e Ol d - S c h o o l Cu r s e s Say: I hope your lover is a broken tugboat. Say: You will wake up in the body of Sacagawea with white man allergies. Say: If you run over a fox, you’ll take his heart with you and, one by one, foxes will run into the highway, giving themselves over to the night, and before you know it, poof! there goes the ecosystem. Good. Say: May you never see the old world. Don’t say: Your mama’s so fat. Instead: Your mama’s never made winter soup out of her dead husband, doesn’t know how to take marrow and make heat, uses both hands to roll dice, motherfucker. Say: Son of a Mayflower. Say: Daughter of the American Revolution with the breath of a musket, you will break each bone in your body like a fevered promise to God. Good. Say: I hope your backyard erupts into a field of three-leaf clovers which smell unmistakably like wet dog.

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Say: Your firstborn will be a terrible, but dedicated, violinist. Say: Your great-grandparents will die, and your grandparents will die, and your parents will die, and you will never quite remember the story they always told about some town with a name as braided as rope, some kind of splinters in a man’s palms.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W i t h P o ll i n a t i o n I will make something of you both juniper and ipecac. A month of night. Something singing like a housefly moments before the palm, cracking like a bottle or window in winter. Although it is the oldest invention, the first time you built a fire is something to remember. The other times, less so. Tonight I didn’t kill anything. Tomorrow I will sell flowers by the pound, the neighbors will smash them into their noses and close their eyes.

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Going North The black bear of a Bible that belonged to my grandparents has gold-lined pages, paws dipped in honey. Running through its forests is like déjà vu every time. The black bear eats everything. If you’ve never stared past its teeth, you’ve never held your breath waiting to be ended. The largest male black bear weighs almost a thousand pounds and can be found hunting at night somewhere deep in the North. I still have nightmares of his silence. I haven’t eaten fish since I saw him pick a salmon from its bones.

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Genealogy One of my grandparents rented a gramophone, another owned three songbirds and a shot glass. One slept in the day, the other remembered the timbre of wild horses, tallgrass prairies. All of my belongings are loosely related to paper; some by ancestry, others by weight or malleability, by color or function or analogy. One of my grandparents was always connected to machines. Another witnessed Mussolini strung up like a bird feeder. All of my girlfriends have tattoos in languages they cannot speak. One of my grandparents was a darkened basement; another was a clothesline waiting for summer, already exploding in white and wind, shaking like a fist at the imperfect sky. I have a kind of recurring nightmare, only it comes in daytime when I am awake, but like a dream I cannot control it and it teaches me something about falling. In the vision, my home catches fire like paper does, quick and forever.

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I stumble from room to room, searching for something worth saving, but cannot choose. One of my grandparents was a wood stove. Another was an axe.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , F a t Tu e s d a y Then I ate the dust of an abandoned house, and in my mouth it was as sweet as the time our heat kicked on after three days. Then I ate a newspaper, and it flared into my chest. Then I ate the blood from the sidewalk and the locks from the stores. Then I ate a police officer’s gun, dismantling it into small pieces like warm bread and tucking them slowly into my mouth. And as I swallowed all this, I expanded. And as I took the city into me like a harvest, I grew hard as brick, hard as a frozen creek behind a cemetery overflowing with names I cannot remember for I have eaten them, too, yes, I have gorged myself on the dead. I have made my body haunted, and it was sweet as a creaking hinge in the dark.

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D e pa r t u r e , T h e Pat h B a c k P u d d l e d Over And Darkened Years earlier, Baba promised she’d haunt us when she died. Leave the dice on the kitchen table, she said. Remember my favorite number. The month she passed, nobody was able to gamble. Dad grabbed a deck of cards and a spider bit him. We tucked the dice away and moved. It was the same month I made the Sign of the Cross every time I drove by a church, held two fingers up to the roof of the car while passing beneath a train, sang the wrong words to all my favorite songs. Hail sounded like rain. Graffiti was unreadable, like somebody else’s handwriting rotting on the back of a photograph I found, maybe an old wedding picture, black coats and a blur of white. I hung the image on the refrigerator door. My father must’ve taken it down one night.

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D o n ’ t A s k W h y I S t o pp e d B e l i e v i n g In Magic darling, unless you want to hear about the year Darnell’s little sister was struck by a drive-by bullet through her bedroom window, or how I condemned my dad’s laziness for missing Christmas Eve dinner two weeks before he died, or that I have friends my age who are already divorced. True, sometimes it rains so hard, the whole city sounds like a music box. Sometimes the snow makes our neighborhood feel like a secret handshake. And true, sweetheart, we just met a month ago and here I am, writing you this letter while a train howls past my apartment, and I wonder if it would take me to you, if the body must one day end in order to be more like a myth, if remembering is a kind of magic. The last time I visited my old neighborhood, I couldn’t tell the difference between the houses that had been hit by the tornado

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and the ones that were simply run down. I walked up to my old house and ran my hand along the siding, wondering who lived there now, and I remembered the time when Misian and Alicia and maybe others started sleeping in their little sisters’ beds with their backs to the outside walls, hoping to protect the children from stray gunfire, lying over them soft as snow, and now, looking at the photo you sent me of you holding a newborn, I don’t think I can answer your question except by telling you the night is sweet where I am, and sometimes I’m a forgetful man.

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II. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. —Czesław Miłosz

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W i t h B l i g h t A man started pouring out a 40 for his dead friends and a woman started pouring out a 40 for her dead brothers and some boys started pouring out 40s for their dead fathers and soon it was everybody on the block, and soon it was everybody in the neighborhood, and soon the sewers runneth over with malt liquor, and soon it was any spirits: jugs of wine, handles of rum, mouthwash and cough syrup, and soon the streets absorbed all of this stench and prayer. But the dead friends were still dead friends, the dead brothers were still dead brothers, the dead fathers were still dead fathers, and everybody on the block and everybody in the neighborhood saw their friends and brothers and fathers from the corners of their eyes sometimes but didn’t tell anybody. The ghetto is this slick river.

:::

Never mind the ocean, boy. You get lost out in that big blank nothing. You think you can float faceup? Where you think oceans come from?

:::

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The peddlers peddle by the riverbanks, and the hustlers hustle by the riverbanks, but they are not just peddlers and hustlers. But the river bends the light. There are mothers who stand like saints at the window, waiting for their children, and there are mothers who don’t. There are basketball players and shitty basketball players. There’s a homeless man who runs alongside random cars, racing them down the street. He is training for the Olympics, he says, though some say he’s just high. And another homeless guy called Smurf, whose face is covered in scars, saved my friend Bobby from a group of stick-up kids one night and left for rehab the next morning. But the river bends the light. You need to learn how to see.

:::

The ghetto is this slick river and everybody who lives away from its banks tosses something into it from time to time. Scarecrows and voodoo dolls, epithets that never sink.

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Some take tours down to the water, a kind of penance, stones in their shoes. They bring bicycles and stay in churches and drink organic coffee and never take photographs.

:::

When I was growing up, I thought it was normal for police searchlights to shine into apartment windows every once in a while. A natural cycle of nights. The way the moon reflects in every river, makes itself big before recoiling. They snaked across walls, reshaped the shadows. Never any news of what they were looking for, what they found. Just the lights and then dark. Lights and then dark. Lights and then dark.

:::

Behold, this river makes all things new. New churches and cathedrals. New prayers. Make a pilgrimage to the abandoned auto plant, speak in tongues in front of the corner store. Get used to candlelight vigils: marches

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to lead the dead back home, marches to the bathroom when they shut off the power.

:::

The neighborhood is this slick river and I am this hungry mouth widening, and there is this rushing in the streets and this rushing in my bones, my white bones I tried so long to hide. But everybody sees everybody’s bones here sometimes, everybody’s blood rushes out sometimes like it heard its car window being broken. The trunk peeled open. The whole body trembling. This river is the river of blood I’ve swallowed on my block, the taste of iron, train track, machinery. Or maybe it’s a mask, maybe I’ve smeared it across my face, maybe it’s just the bitter paint I keep slapping around like a dog.

:::

You ain’t shit, says the river. You ain’t nothing but veins. You so weak you need that pumping red bulb

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to keep moving, keep flowing. You only got four chambers? Ha.

:::

The grease. The monsoon. The weight of air, wet with tremor. The spray paint on dumpsters, the black marker on empty newspaper boxes: handmade alphabets of struggle. The trash bag taped to car window. The loud laugh in the street and all the other lies. The hard sleep. The constant river of worry.

:::

Every month, a new dead friend or dead brother or dead father. Today is Benny’s birthday, or was. I keep telling myself I see him in the distance, that I see my father from the corner of my eye. I keep telling myself I believe in resurrections, but it’s been a while since I heard a good ghost story. But the river bends the light. You need to learn how to see.

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:::

And soon the streets absorbed this stench and prayer, and the river carried away the jobs, and the river carried away the grocery stores, and the river carried away the pharmacies, and bodies kept getting lost in the current, the murk, and soon everybody forgot why there was a river in the first place or where it came from. Everybody in the neighborhood was just river people, now. The music they slept to. The procession down to the waters, the daily washing.

:::

This river looks better than split lip and black eye. This river is harder than knuckle, elbow. You ain’t bigger than this river, son. You ain’t never seen yourself on a map.

:::

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There’s a story where a mother saves her son. She builds a basket of bulrush and slime, floats him down the river. He grows up and doesn’t eat for forty days and then he’s a prophet. The story gets it wrong, though. This river is a river for drowning, and whoever writes a story where the hero doesn’t eat for forty days has never gone four without food. Real prophets shoplift. Real prophets pretend to be ghosts, and they learn to move like the quiet and the dead, and their hands get swifter, and their pockets expand to fit more food, expand like the river gnawing into its own banks. Everybody here studies the dead. Everybody here is a kind of haunting.

:::

I wanted to see a cardinal bleed. I wanted the whole earth to darken like a stain. My breath is now a hangman, a handgun. I hold my father’s name like sandpaper under my tongue. I learned you early, river. You fib and myth-make, neighborhood, you say we are already dead, you rot like the lots behind restaurants.

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:::

Save me: O God of slick lacquered hearts, saints of perpetual vinyl-covered mercy, Our Lady of unending grit and survival, sisters of night school, brothers of brick and mortar, tongues of fire, tongues of Polish, tongues of Yiddish, Hmong, Russian, Somali, Viking, tongues of Hiphop, Mill Worker, Bridge Builder, Butcher, Old World, Short-Order Chef, Dead Soldier, Dead Emcee, Dead Gardener, Dead Grandmother, Dead Friend, Dead Brother. Dead Father.

:::

Now you are mean apothecary and I am jukebox, river. You are mustached conductor and I am as big and wild as the plains. You are small, street violence and hunger. You got no rhythm, no moves, you’re stuck and salty about it. Watch me remix you like a forgotten bass line. Come pay to hear me play these victory songs at your wake, these street corner toasts, and yes, these river songs, too, these sad songs, for I have drank of the river, and in my chest is the river, and in my breath is the river, and in my blood is this sweet grief rushing, Amen. 36

III. The problem isn’t that you will become dust but that you ever thought you aren’t already. —Dean Young

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P l a y i n g D e a d M e a n s D i ff e r e n t T h i n g s T o D i ff e r e n t P e o pl e The dead eat everything. Rain, salted rain, honeyed photographs kept in closets. Scientists have proven that the mouth is the last part of the body to die. In the ghetto, put your ear to the wettest door and listen. That’s the jaws dreaming of meat or metal: the pleasure principle. The sickle, after all, is an upper lip with ghost teeth: the black hood obscures the uvula. Even the dead feel bad about eating veal— in the background of AM radio, you can hear them cursing themselves with whatever language they once swallowed like mother’s milk, grieving for youth. When I sleepwalk, I wake up in the kitchen, the one where my grandmother still rolls dice at night though we cannot see her. When I drink, I hide my face in the fridge. Sitting at my father’s last bed, I licked every page of the Bible, and the priest stuffed bread into our mouths, and the chanting consumed the hospital air. Driving home, I hit four fresh potholes, ridged like bite marks in the night.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t F r o m T h e O t h e r S i d e The woods behind my elementary school held ghosts and gang members. We studied the carvings in the trees: GD, Gangster Disciples or some spirit afraid of GOD. We weren’t afraid of neither until we were alone. My friend carried a gun to school and we all believed we were magic. That year my grandfather died. That year I found a Pete Rock tape and twisted my hat backwards like an exorcism gone wrong. Not wrong meaning wrong, but. Not to say I was hard, but. When I write the letter O, I imagine it burns through the paper, that to praise means to open by force. The dropped jaw, the bullet hole, the neighborhood I can never leave.

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Flood The body is a city of bridges, lift bridges and canals and collapses waiting like peonies or plum blossoms to unfold. Flood. I come from the Mississippi which is to say I rub against my borders slowly and fill with filth. I, river, everything becomes me and I flush and flood with the thought of it. To expand, dear body. To widen like the map with every voyage, every cruise and crossing of hands. Flood. The musk of old cabins, dank and moss, the thrust and arc of bodies of water. The violence of desire tamed only by swerve and spill. I, river, I, I, I, I. My name floods away from me. I raise my feet to the table. I listen to traffic and rain and my pulse is both.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W i t h P o w e r Ou t a g e Knock down a power line and it will find whatever ocean is closest. You are a body of water and your God is a knifefish, that nocturnal and electric, that black ghost and glass. You, church of emaciation and sleeping pills, do not let your right hand know the left is unbuilding you. Darken, apartment. Surrender the sweet hum of current, the light needling itself under doorways. Listen. The rain has more than one face. You discharge, you spill from yourself unaware, you are pooling here like the acoustic dark. Throw open the curtains. The rain moves in both directions and you are a body of water splaying yourself to the sky.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W i t h B i g C i t y R e l i g i o n You welcome the collapse of all matter: gunmetal and mulch, knuckle and rain. You are one sucker punch away from the sermon bursting forth like window shards. The block is heavy with bodies, with little oceans of regret and pocketknife prayers. Only the dead stay underground, you preach. The world is storming. You are earthworm, you remember. Your entire body is mobile, the path is longer than three hundred of you. You, that designer skull, that ecosystem of nerves in a box. Become unbundle. Become the bridge falling into the river. You will lie open like a market in morning. Forget the steep incline of summer: the bombmaker sweats even when there is no bomb.

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T o Va n i s h , C o v e r Y o u r E y e s A n d C o u n t When I went back to my family’s old bar for the first time since we sold it, years later, it was the spring nobody could ever find their car. I parked in the lot outside and it ended up miles away. The bartender remembered my dad, though I had already forgotten the sound of his voice. I didn’t even notice when it had left me, like a dog who sneaks away one night and sleeps too long in the road. I didn’t tell the bartender that. We talked about the weather, the cars. She’d been to the impound lot the day before, told me she saw all of her ex-boyfriends there, waiting in line to get their cars back, like some sad afterlife that only people who work in bars can imagine. An underground economy popped up by April to deal with all the vehicles. I hired a tracker to find mine. He asked me what name it responds to, how it reacts when cornered, if there were any secret places it liked to go when lonely. How could I tell him about the alley behind our old house? How could I explain the night the car got stuck in a snowbank

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in Northeast and a stranger pulled it out with a bungee cord? Or the road home from the hospital where they had locked up Ephraim for a week, or the parking lot we watched fireworks from, or the stretch of the highway where, if you’re lucky, you can smell the mint growing in the ditch.

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The Motherland can be any country you want it to be. Russia, Ethiopia, Sweet Tea–Infused Vodka. It doesn’t even need to be a country. Maybe it sounds anathema to call your significant other The Motherland, but after a ten-hour workday, you might be ready to fight a war against oncoming traffic just to kiss familiar topsoil. The Motherland is never the city bus until you move to a small town that doesn’t have one. Name it one of the veins in your wrist. Notice how you can find it no matter where you are. Cut your other hand open and, in a way, that’s The Motherland spilling. If you drink hard enough, you might forget the names of acquaintances and start calling them The Motherland. If they are flattered, buy them a drink. If they are not amused, vomit on the ground directly adjacent to their driver’s side door. Photograph everything you give this name. The imposters will become ghosts. The shoebox of pictures in your closet

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will sometimes sound like a river you can’t quite recognize. That’s what national anthems sound like after you leave. But you’ll still carry them anyway, looking for reminders on every street. There goes Zachary. That’s Ryane, Christy. Here’s the tire swing from the backyard, the bartender from the old speakeasy. Everything you see from the corner of your eye is a flag about to be set on fire. Look at your feet instead. They might be bigger, now, but they remember everything better than you. The Motherland swells like the front door in summer, overtakes everything. It is the Bishop’s weed in the otherwise textbook garden. It is the thrush of Gossypium in the air, a ruin, and it becomes every swallow. The Motherland is your favorite barstool, the smell of rain the morning you left. Nobody can take this from you.

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Not even the mapmakers. Not even your grandchildren. Play your favorite songs for everyone who will listen, and the way the old records bend like dementia—that.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t W h e r e i n E v e r y t h i n g W h i r r s W i t h T h e Sp i r i t I’m gravestone and graffiti, birth-slap and fable. I’m wearing the uproar of neighborhoods on my face like scars. At my feet, bolts and baseball bats. I’m knocking a fire-walking through your window. My collarbone a totem. My left lung a big tent, ritual and parade. Follow my shadow through cascades of sewer steam, past painted alleys and figures folded up in the night like holy men. I’m a pile of bones in grass. When watered I dance backwards through days. When rattled I slip into the jukebox and play slowed-down gospel until everybody at the bar is a cloud of heat and mouth. I’m orphan and flash of holiday light. I’m the great river undressing. Come closer, listen to the sky inside me.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , Af t e r D r i v e - B y The hearse edges through the streets like a stray, like it does every week. The guns still sing. Here, every death could be anybody’s. Here, we all know the weight of an urn or a mother fainting in the kitchen. We all step into the night and forget any sounds our fathers made while dying. The sounds were a kind of armor, anyway, not things we knew like a door closing softly at midnight. I miss him. There, I said it. One day, we hope, cars won’t slow past our apartments, won’t hymn through us like shovels. Where does a car disappear to after passing? Where do we go when the night is too large, too full of itself to confess? Sometimes dancing comes from the inside, wells up sweet as seizure, and sometimes dancing happens to the body when it is struck and struck from the outside.

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B o bb y H a s n ’ t E a t e n I n T h r e e D a y s I’m thinking of Bobby Sands, but nobody knows history anymore. These days, Flavor Flav is more famous than Chuck D. So maybe Bobby is between jobs. Maybe it’s anorexia nervosa, like I know what it means to bake a fat, sweet cake and serve it all to my older sister, watching every bite like a firework. Maybe I don’t even know Bobby, I’m thinking about mountaintop removal instead. Why not name the mountain Bobby? That would be a stupid name for a mountain, right? My friend Bobby Weekend, who I nicknamed years ago, called me yesterday and said he’s three months clean, he’s not even thirsty anymore, and I said good. I didn’t tell him he will be, again. He knows. His nickname almost didn’t stick because one day, drunk, he climbed on top of a moving car and fractured his skull on the windshield, and everybody started calling him Bobby Windshield, and we thought it was funny, back then. It’s not like we called him Bobby Nightstick, or Bobby Overdose, or Bobby Heartbreak. It’s not like he didn’t laugh a goon’s laugh and piss his new name off the roof.

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Cartilage, Cartilage Careful like a candle I always harden back into myself and am reshaped, maybe, but alive. I have walked through fires and swung kitchen knives like a specialist in heat. I have slept through natural disasters and band practices only to dream of growing up to be a designer of lackluster bridges. Bring me blindfolded to the candy store and make me tongue the walls. Put taffy in my hands, whisper cartilage, cartilage. The consistency of matter is only a matter of packaging, the dense and swarm of flesh, musculature. I am bloat and barrel. I am a series of mouths that do not need watering. This bark, this patina, is the only anchor I drag across the dirt.

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El e g y O n Ol d - S c h o o l D r um M a c h i n e Today, I’m cold sweat swagger like cruising Franklin Avenue with the windows down and the heat on, bumping a mix CD that goes Prince, The Last Poets, John Cougar Mellencamp, Prince. I got a four-finger ring that says DOPE, and a bag of cheeseburgers riding pistol on the passenger-side floor. I’m going the way of fake-fur coats and salt-stained gloves. The boots I wear were my dad’s. I almost always keep them untouched in the corner of my overpriced studio apartment, but not today. Today, I’m a Slick Rick song about Russian mystics, a single bone I dug up in a friend’s yard as a kid. There’s a bus stuck in the snow. There’s a high schooler wearing basketball shorts in the cold, trying to impress a girl and failing, and that brings me back, hard, like the fatherly smell of leather. Where’s the parking lot where we used to play the Dozens, OHHHs steaming out our mouths like clouds? Back then, I had a homie who licked a frozen gun on a dare, once, and got his tongue stuck to it, and he did it again another day for fun. The same guy—years later, same self-inflicted haircut—dances around downtown every Thursday at 5pm, flailing his arms like a Don Quixote nightmare, and responding, whenever a stranger asks him what’s up, don’t you feel it, too?

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T h a um a t u r g y rarely happens in the suburbs. It’s all sunburns and shrubbery, there. I’ve never climbed a tree and thought, Wow. I’ve never seen the ocean, but I have stood on a bloodstain shaped like a wave and thought about how small we are, how whatever washes you can be a big emptiness you get lost in, and I stood there every day for a year for the repetition of it, like a novena. The city bus repeats itself. The breakbeat in my head repeats itself, and maybe this is how déjà vu works, and maybe I’d rather remember some things that never really happened, like the time I danced so well I raised the dead, my old dog or Dad, I think, I think it was in Baba’s house, I think the record kept skipping in a perfect loop.

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Drop The first time I won the Dozens was as happy as a baptism. I got dropped backwards into a river, the congregation spoke in tongues, I never bled the same way after. Now, I speak like car accident & cancer diagnosis in your thirties, drop of pure caffeine, Scripture rained to pulp. Drop. Basement just means: ain’t no staircase to where you’re headed next. Basement is a misnomer. I, rogue & stupor, dropping science as casual as shedding my own skin. I go down like a king in the age of the guillotine, worship the descent of blood from the nose like a Virgin Mary hoax, drop like church attendance, dig through crates of vinyl like raiding graves for gold, yes, I get down, yes, this body & its slow letting go is just practice.

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Maker O Maker (& by Maker perhaps I mean whatever scotch my father could afford in May of 1985), take me in your endless mouth, mouth, repeat me like a name until I lose all meaning. I make war on the one-hit wonder underneath my skin, feed me to the forgetful mouth, mouth of the freezer. Rein -carnate the mixtape of me into sweet digital, that final razor-proof ontology, no cut & fade, no hand on vinyl, no meat on the bones or bone. The day my father died, the lake was as hard as any kid on my block (O cold folding knife blade against palm), so I made the rank of mallard & migrated. Fallacy is the mistake I live by, the pathetic worship of the porch (that opened mouth at night). Let’s try to make out the code of car alarms by breaking each other’s blood vessels, listening for rasp & pattern. Without mouth, the body is

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a closed-circuit. Without meat, I eat only microphone & make only sad boom bap -less sex. O Maker, beat me like you were a blacksmith & let me glow.

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S e lf - P o r t r a i t , K n e e l i n g The draw of being a saint is not the gauze-soft beauty of chastity, not the healings or casting out of demons, not even the martyr’s baptism by blood. It is the fact that there will still be work to do after dying. An assembly line of prayers to be stamped, bundled, and brought before the throne. If there is anything like leisure in my heart, Lord, remove it. If Heaven is palm trees, or paved in gold, or the slow rush of waves, or candlelit, or quiet as a suburban church, give me axe, chisel, tugboat, electric, riot. Send me work, Lord. I have slept enough. My hands are good hands. This is why I believe in ghosts, energies and vengeances, doors opening themselves. My spirit animal is a haunted washing machine I once owned that would rumble whenever unplugged. I’ll bet Baba is still bootlegging white lightning nightly. The dead sweat. The halo is more hard hat than headrest. Do not tell me to rest in peace. I am too human to fade like static behind the tune of brushfires and gunshots and trumpets of war, too much body to stay clean, too much prayer to leave this ache and exhaust behind. Somewhere, there is a river sweeping through a city so ruined, it is perfect, and there is a line of people leaving an old factory just before dusk, a man lighting a cigarette and flicking the match into the river, a woman in Carhartt overalls watching the flame drop into the water,

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and the river is a great tongue, and the woman is like the match somehow, and the man, too, and the river is moving through the city like a hairbrush, and I am sure, Lord, this is the city of my birth.

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A c k n o wl e d g m e n t s Many thanks to the following journals in which versions of these poems, sometimes under different titles, first appeared: Anti-: “Dictator, by Which I Mean the Mother Brandishing a Pistol with a Piñata over Her Head” Birdfeast: “Going North” The Cincinnati Review: “Drop” and “Forage” The Collagist: “Genealogy” EPOCH: “Self-Portrait, Fat Tuesday” Hayden’s Ferry Review: “Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular” The Journal: “Flood” kill author: “Cartilage, Cartilage” Muzzle Magazine: “Baba Sits You on the Kitchen Table and Teaches You All the Old-School Curses” and “Bobby Hasn’t Eaten in Three Days” The New: “Self-Portrait from the Other Side” Ninth Letter: “Self-Portrait, Wearing Bear Skull as Mask” Ploughshares: “In Minneapolis, My Father” Revolution House: “The Motherland” RHINO: “Home Remedies” Sou’wester: “Self-Portrait, Downtown” and “Self-Portrait Wherein Every­thing Whirrs with the Spirit” Sycamore Review: “Maker” Toad: “Self-Portrait with Pollination” Union Station Magazine: “Self-Portrait with Blight” The Yalobusha Review: “Self-Portrait with Big City Religion” Many thanks to Dorianne Laux for selecting this book for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and for her editorial insight. Thanks to David Hassler and the staff at the Wick Poetry Center and the Kent State University Press for their guidance and hard work in making this book a real thing.

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I owe everything to my teachers, friends, colleagues, and fam for all their support and wisdom during the making of these poems, especially: Elizabeth Dodd, Ross Gay, Margaret Ronda, Adrian Matejka, Dan Hoyt, Lily Duffy, Sierra DeMulder, Sam Cook, Khary Jackson, Steph Horvath, Doug Paul Case, Jennifer Luebbers, Ife-Chudeni Oputa, Cate Lycurgus, Nandi Comer, Katie Moulton, Keith Leonard, Michael Lee, Dylan Garity, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Neil Hilborn, Colin Welch, Sarah Rock, Alex Zimmermann, Ryane Hart, Jimbo Ivy, Dan Hornsby. Most of all, thank you to my mother, my father, and Grandma Toni; this book is for them.

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Notes “Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular” uses lines from Eireann Lorsung’s “The World and the Ocean and the Sky” and The Pharcyde’s “Drop.” “Dictator, by Which I Mean the Mother Brandishing a Pistol with a Piñata over Her Head” was titled by Lily Duffy. “In Minneapolis, My Father” owes a debt to Eduardo C. Corral’s “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes.” “Self-Portrait, Wearing Bear Skull as Mask” is for Steph Horvath. “Self-Portrait, July” is for Rob Weekend, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Snoop, and the Crack Spot. “Self-Portrait, Downtown” begins with a line from Arlene Kim’s “Reasons We Left.” “Self-Portrait with Pollination” owes a debt to Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Still Life, with Gloxinia.” “Self-Portrait, Fat Tuesday” responds to Ezekiel 3:3. It is for Sam Sax. “Genealogy” is modeled after Betsy Sholl’s poem of the same title. “Don’t Ask Why I Stopped Believing in Magic” is for Sarah Rock. “Self-Portrait from the Other Side” owes a debt to Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper.”

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“Flood” is inspired by Quinn White’s “Open.” “The Motherland” is for Manhattan, Kansas. “Self-Portrait Wherein Everything Whirrs with the Spirit” is modeled after Eduardo C. Corral’s “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso.” “Bobby Hasn’t Eaten for Three Days” is for Rob Weekend. “Elegy on Old-School Drum Machine” is for Adrian Matejka. “Thaumaturgy” is for Khary Jackson.

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