In the event that the cookout is cancelled
& so I tear me
from my own selfish grief;
soothe my anxiety into a poem
caulking my reassurance line by line.
I poem the way a man
staring at a mountain’s horizon
from the base of his obsession
makes a keepsake of every foothold.
I poem the lung’s osmosis,
Abandoning my breath’s
. dictation
. to the wind
I poem memories
of my baby brother at infancy,
place his quickening upturnt brow
onto earth’s decaying orbit
& monitor his reflected laugh in the moon’s glare.
I poem my mom into everything
that gives my pen pulse,
& she writes herself
a nurturing constant
into the meter of my life.
My sister poems herself
as confidant to whom
the apocalypse shivers at;
our conjoined laugh is stitched
at the nervous system, disorienting
the melancholy in each stanza.
I poem my fathers,
chronicle their insistence
in eroding flint from my forehead
through their wellsprings of wisdom.
Pen the jagged softening into fluidity.
I poem the Messiah,
testify of each day’s taste,
swoon at the sugar
& sift, through the bitter, acidity
of meals mistakenly consumed.
I poem my eroding flesh,
dismissing the tendered gall
& repent, sacrificing the days
not consumed with love’s burning bush.
I poem cousins
in trips to the convenience store
and Pepsi’s
bought with my aunt’s money.
I poem Chicago
& all the days spent separate
from family I don’t see enough.
But I poem the reunions
especially snug into the paper,
stuffing the margins
with the branches in the family tree
until the leaves tug
tighter at my roots.
& so I poem, my family first
& foremost, because if it ends
they were all that was left
for me.
& in the event
the screen fades to black
before the film finishes
I braid the BBQ scent
into the credits without charring flesh,
I stencil the sway of hips
massaging stiffness from the air
all along the cardboard cover
& in this ending scene
we all outlive the bullet
or the cancer,
or the divorce
& the only moral
is shared laughs,
the game of spades,
or the well-licked spoon wet with cake batter
the coffin saved for all my pretense.
In this renege of an apocalypse
bury me in creation’s breath
as it caresses the mountain peak
and let the Creator breathe again
Terrance Brown: 23 by way of St. Louis Missouri, previously published in Bellerive’s Sonder, wusgoodblack.com, issue 3 of Bad Jacket, poetrypotion.com & the site BrooklynButtah.com. A pacifist deciphering the mathematics of a war time society. Bred from scribbles on the tabletops in your local schoolery.