moth caught in a gale and blown against a wall and clinging there beating feebly
The symmetry of the little beasts as their wings open and close me. I am the shadow of dust. Every bridge makes an underside. There, the ego, a bruise. The mind just a ball of thread, unraveled. I’m quiet again except for the brush of air as it leaves me. I hold my hands up to make an arch until my blood can’t stand it. I’ve been known to take the nightmare out on my body. I let its hunger eat me.
I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.
Do us both the favor of a last gasp of breath. I’ve watched the heart beat itself into submission. I’ve seen the way a body struggles to turn itself inside out when in pain, when it can feel itself drowning in its own overwhelm. How it writhes and tries to seek a place to lie down where it can be still. But the stillness does not come until we deliver it.
To live after that stillness. When the heart breaks itself into a pain that can only be lived, not sublimated, not softened.
I sympathize with her desire not to let things be final. Absence is always what follows. And, our minds don’t easily accept the hole of the absent thing. Shadows come alive. Dreams try to convince us that the absent ones will return. Sleep says that we’ve mistaken a short trip for death. That even death has an end. Ghosts are a great source of comfort. That’s why she calls them continually in her speeches to us. A recitation as a resuscitation of history. Her hands pounding the chests of family. Those beautiful homes. Those emblazoned coffins that must have only held the bodies of insistently good souls.
It was as though it had not been she who spoke, but the house itself that said the words
And so I admonished it. Struggled to abolish and absolve it. That stench that sticks to the floorboards; carpets matted with dark red mud. Trekked from a triangular tract formed at the mouth, her river of endless speech, her river that runs without acknowledgment. The aspiration of a delta looking north. Say no more about what could have been. Water always wins. And the house sinks.
Beyond those stairs, a boarded room, nailed and sealed, to keep the history in, the war zone out. To listen, you’d believe it was all about family glory and the sacrifices of kind men. The house wouldn’t lie to you, would it? Do you trust the floors you cannot see? The rooms you cannot visit? Paper over. Nail over. Over and over.
To make the rending gash
He said to put something down.
Put down your burden.
Put down your roots.
Put down your name.
Put down payment.
Put down the blinds.
Put
someone down.
<<Woe to that country where the sun of liberty has to rise up out of a sea of blood.>>
<<They are at the mercy of the people, and the people are without mercy.>>
The river runs black with blood. And the air in the house is thick with smoke, smoke to hide the faces stored in its crevices. I don’t know how to talk about what has been erased. The people she unsees as people. The labor that made her world possible. The humanity its making broke. The tired, worn bodies of men, women, and children who had to recreate for themselves a dignity, a breath, a repose.
That is the substance of remembering
The cotton threads that tie us to them. Come to us like the wrappings and trappings of heat. The mummification of a body left to the steam.
It was that innocence again, that innocence, which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake
We talk just enough
that she knows I am alive. The roses in bloom. The rotating complaints of
another season. Enough that she can remind me again that we are always the
victims of our own choices. As though we cannot be the victims of others'
choices as well. Innocence may be impossible or not worth talking of, but
aren’t we born into the weight of someone’s choices, carrying something before
we can raise our heads to acquiesce?
There are a lot of
choices I’d like to make again, and even more that I wish hadn’t been made for
us. There’s hubris, and there is fate, and I have raged against both and lost.
I have looked the other
way.
I have stepped around the body on the sidewalk and called it
safety.
Please note:
Italics are drawn from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, and bold text from The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by John Jacobs
Carrie Olivia Adams [photo credit: Emilie Robinson] lives in Chicago, where she is the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean and the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. She writes the “Poetry & Biscuits” newsletter on Substack and curates a house reading series by the same name. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.
