Isaac Pickell

Content warning: anti-Blackness, slavery

our greatest ambition, to be met somewhere other than the middle

passage—just a shadow but sometimes
it’s hard to walk around in your own 

worn shoes like an old truth, grotesquely
retrospect of addressed flesh & grit 

teeth. across a sea that is big & was
already old, what survives may not be 


               pretty: what color could shadows
               be once this present is subsumed? 

answered in that familiar hush,
saved for spaces where your life is

the one game in town. so many bodies 
find predicaments, but it’s rare
 
to worry over naming 
blame while they are still 
 
only named bodies, haunting  
us like a ghost that isn’t quite
 
friendly yet carries along with you  
knowing you need the company  

for the habit of horror.  
a habitat teaches you to remain

resilient or alive. most times  
that is enough to be and joy  

is safely ignored, but when they demand 
to hear mourning you can remain 

enough, be made sacred by silence &
 
leave them to listen & listen & listen
for the stillness of no  

sound at all, running head 
long for your brilliant, elated pause.

in the absence of a parrot 

                                                      a nature curated in the obverse  
                                                      self we have always craved as conquerors
 
                                                      airbrushed past all recognition 
                                                      of our predation, a shadow at the whole 

                                                      which word alone cannot erase  
                                                      from the geologic record 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured  
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

the familiar shapes of our noses, the color  
on our backs and our shoulders, the voices  
trapped as legacies of legacy invested in ornaments  

like truth, molded into anachronistic  
oddities waiting for their day to be
  
sold at market literate in the value of remains  
grown small with time, even our oak shriveled, softened 
 
for the hands of children elastic as they wiggle  
the rods, rattle bladeless sabers, able to imagine  
they never sought blood, never drained color from any face
 
recognizable as man; how inviting these artifacts
as they approach dissolution. even waves turn  
static waiting for break, distance decays, even 
 
the sand slows itself from melting as glass resting 
between you and drowning, an imagined protection 
 
                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

a hilly cemetery nearby in the tall weightless grass, an old
barn melting into ground across the bay, a good place  
to share with a cat or something else to outlive, accessories 


to remember instead of leaving behind. the world at my back,
exposed to nothing but the humming drone of nothing, the rest  of
the world all in process. become this thing we tell ourselves we are 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps  

the grief which your cat lacks when it fails  
to miss you, or your own
  
nostalgia, an evolutionary wedge which found a way
to process loss as promise, holding on 

to every one of our mistakes, until mirrors  
fade back into sand and we drown
 
                                                      under the weight of it all  

                                                      the historical record keeps  
                                                      for its sheer number of things 
 
                                                      expanding as we are, the time 
                                                      to answer question is past.

for all the broken things unfixed with nothing  left but time to fix them 

we’ve discovered whole vocabularies 
of disappointment; maybe I am 

as old as we all feel, detached 
as we all think. what if all this talk 
 
of new normal is nothing more  
than old rumor finally hitting the fan 
& we all see the very same thing 

in the inkblot splatters on separate walls 
& can’t chalk it up to happenstance, again. 

what if all this distance is is 
a really big mirror facing 

the wrong way. what if the universe was not 
such an unspeakable terror
 
for its endlessness & my hands, 
pale palms unburned & open, 

tumbled each and every one of you 
I could ever imagine loving, breathing 

& petrified, into the inert 
vision at the ends of my own 

go-go-gadget arms, finally enough 
to fold each and every one

within a single shared thought and not 
recognizing the universe in deference 

to its scale we always mistranslate 
as endless difference. will each and every
 
or even just one of you 
please pity me with this simple kindness:
 
tell me it’s okay that the universe is so big 
that it must be ignored.
Isaac, who has light brown skin, and short brown hair and beard, is shown standing before a poster presentation. Isaac wears rounded rectangular glasses, a blackstrapped backpack, and a light blue shortsleeved tee, which reads FOLLOW ME in red letters, and which, over the lettering, shows a ladybug with a dotted flight line trailing behind it. In the right hand, Isaac holds a large black insect that might be a cockroach; on the left forearm, a black rectangular tattoo is visible.

Isaac Pickell is a passing poet & PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he lives & studies the borderlands of blackness & black literature. His work’s found in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, Protean Magazine, and Sixth Finch, and his debut chapbook everything saved will be last is available now from Black Lawrence Press. 

 

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