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 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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