This is a game for when the nights are long
and mom needs a break. You turn out the lights
and roll newspaper into baseball bats.
You close your eyes and scream and flail.
No one can hit anyone with any force this way.
This was my father’s game. Everyone feels like a winner,
like they’ve got something to say about being bad.

King Kong

The game is King Kong. The baby is under my arm
hand wrapped around the barrel of her. No one makes
me feel so animal. More ape. I throw myself into the air.
I climb up to the roof of our house. All the while
I beat my chest. I made the world. The world is safe.
The world is a safe place for you.

A Dangerous Man

Despite the bravado
I am not what you might call
a dangerous man though
I’m handy with a crowbar
I’m not afraid to spend
money to make money
I like watching fights
I don’t understand justice
I’d like to garden all day
maybe raise some fruit
that tastes sweet but also fresh
and think about sugar
and colonization I’d like to sip
tea on the porch and eat
surrounded by loved ones
all of them well fed and happy
and for them I’d do everything
in my considerable power
all the dangerous things
all the quiet violence required.

The post “Bad Doggy in the Dark,” “King Kong,” and “A Dangerous Man” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.

The post When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

like the kid who knows

he’s a year too old

to sit on the mall Santa’s lap,

waiting in line anyway,

hedging his bets

to make certain that new dirt bike

is under the tree.

Which is to say, I am aware,

but not sorry,

about my concurrent desperation for

and disbelief in

some heavenly robber baron

peering down at his factory floor

from a high office window,

ready to deliver us non-union

hoi polloi whenever we cry out

for his benevolence. Right now,

I’m praying the woman I love

is not pregnant.

With God, I use the word ruin,

ignore the guilt that comes

knowing I am made in His image.

I told the woman I love

I’d go with her to the clinic,

pay whatever the cost,

but she says, no,

she says, we’re keeping it.

Fear turns every prayer

into a bargain.

Reader, am I more ashamed

of what I’m asking to be done,

or how you can see me

kneeling at the edge of my bed

with the limited omniscience

I’ve given you?

Because if you can see it, God can see it.

Silence, His answer also.

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After and for Wanda Coleman

i wanna talk about wanda, wanda can i talk about you
wanda can i talk to you, wanda, girl, mam, sistuh, mama
how should i address you, how should i dress for you
wanda what should i wear, wanda are you worn out
can i get a word with you wanda what should i call you
wicked witch wordsmith wonderful wanda i got a mouth
full of wanda & i wanna talk about wanda

wanda where should we go, wanda you ever been to
wakanda, wanda how can i reach you, on the world wide
web@wanda, at 1-800-itswanda, why’s nobody talkin
bout you wanda, i’m worried about you
wanda are you dead

i need to talk to you, i been wandering, girl, i been
wallowing, wanda i gotta go to work in the morning
wanda what do you wish for, wanda come to bed
wanda let’s go for a walk, wanda let’s drink some
whiskey, wanda let’s do fourteen lines & stay up all
night cause i need to talk to you wanda

wanda, i been watching you, waaaaaanndaaaaaaaa!
i hear you wanda & i wanna talk about how you done
opened this wound & i wanna be just like you
wanda where are you, wanda i love you

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Mark Kendall’s fingers slither up the strat’s fretboard
so smooth the sound comes out of a Marshall stack
like butter, and then Audie Desbrow switches
from brush on cymbal to thumping the tom:
now Great White is rocking the f—k out.
Permed hair swings side to side, like they’ve seen
in endless videos of glam bands shredding,
though their sound owes more to blues
than Lemmy or Slash. But the crowd of suburban moms,
teens in black concert shirts, bikers with spider tattoos,
and pool hall burnouts could care less about theatrics—
the flash pots and pyro waterfalls earn no applause—
they just want to sway to gravelly-throated melodies.
This is my first concert, the Patriot Center,
we pounded their cassette in Mike’s mom’s minivan
the whole way here, we’re eighteen rows back,
which still feels close enough to catch a pick
if Michael Lardie tosses one away, and at the end
of the night I’ll freeze this moment in time
and Great White will become immortal.
That’s how we think when we’re fourteen
and the volume is turned up loud: what’s come before
and passed was temporary but now, this moment,
the one that had been waiting for me to live it—
even if I can feel the tug of time at my sleeve
I don’t have to believe there’s anything better
than, or after, now. There’s so much I can’t fathom
about the tour bus of time, which idles out back
of the arena, knowing we’ll all have to board
and ride and ride and ride. In fifteen years those guys
on stage will be worn thin with addiction, haunted
by tables blocking the exits of a nightclub on fire,
arthritic and angry and sad. In thirty I’ll slide an old tape,
…Twice Shy, into the deck and give it
thirty seconds before it goes in the trash:
how hollow its keyboards, how meager its bass,
how empty that rasp that once I thought had soul.
I’ll think about all I’ve learned and won’t pine
for a time when the ordinary wonder of youth
seemed so unglamorous I tried to drown it out
with hairspray, double-necked guitars
and gaunt idols in leather pants. But how much can be said
for age and wisdom? My ear still throbs
from the mall piercing kiosk, I’ve had my first sip
of beer, and this is the moment I’ll return to
for the rest of my life. The singer is twitching,
his mic stand holding him up. It’s the most
rock and roll thing I’ve seen to date. It’s cartoonish.
It’s the most rock and roll thing I’ll ever see.

The post Great White Rocks the F—k out, 1989 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

that fat bee bumping up against the window,
the faint sound of a neighbor’s car radio.

And if neither here nor there is where we are
then perhaps the Sunrise Nursing Home is the dawn,

is the new day, perhaps leaving your mother with a stranger
not unlike her—divorced with three kids, threatened

with dismissal if she refuses to work a double shift—
perhaps this is the white flag the world has been waiting for,

the moment before the universe says, Just kidding
and you can turn around and drive your mother back

to a house that’s wheelchair accessible, to the English teacher
(strong, reliable…) you hoped was in your future

or perhaps a sister who likes being in charge, loves
to be right so that every decision you don’t want to make,

so that whatever reality is or isn’t,
at least you’re not in there by yourself.

The post New Day appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

a garden of irises now grows where my family’s
favorite shopping mall used to be

in the end, i learn, even time
surrenders itself to memory

in my dreams, i watch women who raised me pack
faded family photographs into emptied pillowcases

like shadows children trail blindly behind parents
on the road to refugee camps outside the country

a woman uses my face to trace in her memory
what my mother looked like as a young girl

long before the first gunshot went off
in the middle of the city.

another blows prayers into her son’s face,
before he leaves for school

on the news, terrorists threaten to start killing
kidnapped train passengers.

elementary school teachers protest with placards
for unpaid salaries. cameroonian government

complain of a surge of asylum seekers
most of which are from my country. during visits,

i hear victims of bomb attacks on hospital beds,
empty endless rivers of curses into the deafened ears

of the government. hundreds of exiles get lost
in the sands, trying to cross the sahara desert.

after the stitches are removed, a boy stares
into a mirror at a face he fails to recollect

as his own. in a documentary, doctors struggle
to hold back the blood jetting through

a splintered vein in a girl’s neck. on the cityscape
a dark cloud spreads silently like a tumor under an eye.

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—after Frederic Edwin Church’s “Mt. Ktaadn”

because the trees carry no names;
because the peaks spear the sky

like nails biting into familiar mangoes;
because I had not spoken Tagalog in weeks;

because my mother had texted me a picture
of the first red berries of our aratilis tree;

because the painted cows bowed like the cows
on my grandfather’s farm, their jowls

sagged with age; because in the second before
I read the description, I mistook this American

mountain for the gentler slopes of Mount Makiling;
because our myths believe Mount Makiling is the fossilized

body of a kind goddess or an alternate Calypso
spiriting men away into marital happiness;

because, like the boy in the corner of the painting,
I had also trusted our aratilis tree to bear my weight

those young evenings I had plotted to leave—leaving being the central
conflict I assume he has also chosen; because, like me, the boy would not

withhold anything from a goddess who whisks him home;
because, like me, he could grow to forget time’s distance;

because from that distance our lives held
the same inexplicable element of loss.

The post Bildungsroman appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We lack the lexicon
to commune with rising rivers
or decipher omens from driftwood.
But the winter beetle
beset with dusty drought
remembers the river’s rhapsodies.

When bridges wash out
do we purge neglect
that bottlenecks our restless recall
and do we steel obstinate
while gathering indifference
like ancient cockles at lowtide?

The upper tips of redwoods
blot the morning rolling fog
startling clouds
and the pine needles
reinforce bird nests
turn brittle but warm
at the higher boughs
of ceaseless cyan.

Come, brother banana slug.
Hither, sister hyacinth.
And consider, cousin caribou
that we make amends
and remember our familial bonds
linking us toward half a chance
at avoiding an easy extinction
together.

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