King Me
By Roger Reeves
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King Me - Roger Reeves
Pledge
I, Roger Reeves, hereby pledge that I will not come back
to this city, if this city will not come back to me.
I leave the children waving their flags and wrists
at a dark sky, without worrying about the coconut tree
dropping its wintered fruit upon their heads.
I leave the man with his one leg turned backward
to walk this street twice as pure contradiction.
I leave the heron on the roof, the dachshunds
scrambling over the cobblestone in their black
patent-leather shoes, and the flies to open wide
and swallow as much melon as they can before evening comes
and that same melon is between my lips.
I leave puddles at the end of driveways
and in them, to float, tiny fronds of a flower
that I cannot name but the woman beside me can.
I leave the fresh bread in wire baskets and the old women
to point at the rolls they wish to place in their mouths.
I leave the opera house, its green domes draped in gold,
the cobbler and his glue, the mechanic and his belly,
and yes, I leave rain to wash every bare foot in this city.
I leave the children’s thirst on the metro
next to a pink pen that no longer holds ink.
I leave the numbers by which I know this city,
its epistemologies and apartheids, its mornings,
its slips of paper, its slivers and its seeds,
its dry floors and short showers, its roosters
that cannot distinguish between the blue of morning
and the blue of night. I leave the coffee spilled
onto the floor of the bus, your hand between my legs—
I leave, I leave—this will surely leave a stain.
Before Diagnosis
The lake is dead for a second time
this January. And no matter
how many geese lay their warm breasts
against the ice or fly across
its hard chest, it doesn’t break,
or sink, or open up and swallow them.
The ice is frozen water.
There is no metaphor for exile.
Even if these trees continue to shake
the crows from their branches,
my sister is still farther away from her mind
than we are from each other,
sitting on opposite ends of a park bench
waiting for evening to swallow us whole.
In the last moments of a depressive, a sun.
In the last moments of a sun, my sister
says a man is chasing a goose through the snow.
Cross Country
When I ran, it rained niggers. Early in October—
the first creases of autumn, a flag-weary sky
in which yellow birds, in flight, slip through the breast-
bone of God and tear at the coarse threads
that keep the morning knit tightly around his heart.
What was it that they sang about the light, their tongues,
the thistles they pluck from the bitter bark
of an allthorn then thrust into the breast of whatever god
or good animal requires eating, a good piercing?
These blond bodies thrashing about above me
were death’s idea of the morning passing. Here,
below this golden altar, the making and unmaking
of my body. The kettle-clank and souring sumac
of a man yelling at the light slipping in and out
of my mouth. What name must I carry above the dust
of this field? Bruised ear, blank body, purple tongue, bloody
God bleeding do you hear me? Deer piss and poison ivy
made pungent by the dew and morning sun rising, do you hear me?
When I ran, it rained niggers. In a ditch along the road,
a pair of wild boars, slain and laid tusk to tail, point,
as if required, in two directions at once, toward my body
pressing the last bits of a hunter’s moon into the tar
of this road and away from the meadow-red light coming
up through the chaff rising above this hectored field
and the man yelling. Nigger in the cicadas tuning up
to tear the morning into tatters. Nigger in the squawk
and clatter of a hen complaining of a hand reaching
below her bottom