Crescendo

Teri Ellen Cross Davis

^{“You almost scared us to death,” my mother muttered
as she stripped the leaves from a tree limb to prepare
it for my back.
—Richard Wright, Black Boy}

My son nests—pawing
each pillow like a breast
fleshed out and so newly
forgotten. I’ve spanked him

once tonight. He takes turns
laughing, then crying, defiant,
then hungry. In his mouth
my name—all need. Pursed

lips plead, Mommy and I
am guilty of the same sin.
I miss his curled and tucked
weight. Embryo, the deepest

root yanked clean. This is why
babies are born crying
into this world, having held
fast to such an intimate tether

who willingly would let go?
But today another white cop walked
free, another black body was still
on the ground. “Not indicted”

undoubtedly the future outcome.
Four years ago I crossed labor’s
red sea of pain to birth a boy—
no doctor hit his backside, now I raise

my hand to complete an act
older than me, breaking the black
back of the boy to make a man
who can survive in America.

Mommy he calls me and my teats
threaten to weep old milk at our stasis.
Both of us needing the succor of sleep,
both of us fighting—him, to keep me near

me, punishing him to be left alone.
He crawls into my lap, his heart
is three, his body, a lanky four.
I cover him with a blanket

too thin to mean it. We rock
on the edge of his bed. Listening
to the symphony’s fourth movement:
the crescendo sweet, full of tension,

taut violin strings singing. I think
Mozart must have known something
of loving with such a tender fear
that it breaks you open like a welt

that bleeds to heal. Tonight I give up,
cuddling this boy so full of belief
in himself, I’m too tired with love
to beat it out of him.

Testimony

Hafizah Augustus Geter

^{for Michael Brown (1996–2014)}

Officer, for hours I lay there.
The sun at my back.
My blood running a country

mile between the pavement
and the crown of my head.
No ambulance ever came.

It took a long time to cover my body.
There are politics to death
and here politics performs

its own autopsies. My aunties
say things like, Boy big and black as you.
Then, the prosecution rests.

My neighbors never do. They lose
sleep as the National Guard parades
down Canfield. I heard my blood

was barely dry. I heard there were soldiers
beating their shields like war cries,
my boys holding hands to hold on

through your tear gas. Heard my mother
wandered the streets,
her body trembling

between a sign of a cross
and a fist. I heard a rumor
about riots got started.

Officer, I heard that after so much blood,
the ground develops
a taste for it.

Americans at Yad Vashem

Amanda Hawkins

We walked the museum in a stupor, sick.

The photographs, the newspapers,

the lampshade made of sewn skin,

the auditorium, monstrous high-gloss paintings,

single faces lit.

The metal tree outside a silhouette:

naked bodies falling

up and out like branches.

Below the tree the crowd

of too-young soldiers talked. The day before

other soldiers detained a student

and his new Muslim friend.

The man had dressed him

to sneak onto the Dome of the Rock.

. . .

One night in Lent a representative

from the Muslim congregation came

to talk to the people of a church.

The imam said forgiveness

is not the same

as reconciliation.

I was teaching writing via immigration laws.

The students argued languages.

The candidates argued walls.

The imam asked the people:

What communities live underground?

Whom don’t we talk about or see?

Whom are we silencing?

. . .

At the museum we saw the names written.

We heard the names through speakers in the walls.

We saw the faces spiraling up.

For once we,

the Americans at Yad Vashem,

did not talk.

. . .

Khalid spoke about oppression and the Quran.

He put quotes on his PowerPoint.

He read the passage loud:

Slay them every one.

Then he reminded us: Muhammad

wrote a letter of protection

for the monks at the base of the Mountain of God.

. . .

I saw that mountain gray-beige—color of cremains.

There are two principle ways

to the summit. The steeper climb they call

the steps of penitence—the most direct route.

We went the other way.

A Bedouin boy led the camel train—

the beasts running in grunts,

spittle and foam strung from their mouths.

At the top a mosque.

Pads for pilgrims to sleep.

An Orthodox chapel. The usual rocks.

And the view of the mountains,

like fractals,

repeating.

. . .

No one told us to be quiet.

We had already seen the wall

some call Geder HaHafrada,

and others jidar al-fasl al-‘unsuri.

We had bussed through the checkpoints eating dates.

The New York Times and the BBC

refer to the wall as a barrier,

West Bank barrier, or separation barrier.

We had visited the café in the new city

outside the old wall.

A week later the café was bombed.

. . .

The candidates stopped talking walls

and started raising fists against radical Islam.

. . .

Khalid said, I am a Muslim;

I am not Islam.

. . .

He ended the Q&A thanking us for the invitation
and attention.
I did not mention the dates or the Mountain of God
or the soldiers.

I did not talk to them at all.

But to the side he told the woman with the tied-up dreads
he is afraid we believe
we will repeat history

if we allow ourselves to speak.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [Even the most kindhearted white woman]

Terrance Hayes

1971 –

Even the most kindhearted white woman,

Dragging herself through traffic with her nails

On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black

Modern American music may begin, almost

Carelessly, to breathe n-words. Yes, even the most

Bespectacled hallucination cruising the lanes

Of America may find her tongue curls inward,

Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedals

When she drives alone. Even the most made up

Layers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicle

Sealed in a fountain of bass & black boys

Chanting n-words may begin to chant inwardly

Softly before she can catch herself. Of course,

After that, what is inward, is absorbed.

Your Friendly Bank Is Offering

Claire McQuerry

a life loan, the right blue dream

home, the ownership you deserve,

the industry to preserve. The providers help

you want it. We mortgage you “yes” and flex-

best-ible. One proud customer at a time.

That’s American wisdom: easier,

more of everything. Everyone deserves

the encore, a raise, respect, results, whatever

dream of local achieve. Purchase it, being.

Proud sponsor of do-done-faster, we

service new solutions, right answers.

We power your expectations of making,

dreams of shade-covered _ _ _ _ _ _.
Employees dedicate themselves to

the World's fulfilling, the family way. Know
the conforming American gets the mortgage.

Dream easier. Dream of good. Dream
today's/tomorrow's guaranteed lead.

Common solutions have purchase. Done it.
Un. Non. All dreams will chip.

Jackhammering Limestone

Erika Meitner

You ask about the leaves and I tell you it’s been so dry here

the leaves are just giving up, turning brown, falling off the trees,

which all look dead. This might be a metaphor for the election or

might be a metaphor for nothing—it’s hard to say. Each morning

I wake up to machines across the street jackhammering limestone,

shearing away more rock-face and turning it to rubble strewn across

red clay soil so dry it heaves and cracks. It’s been seven weeks of

drilling and blasting, drilling and blasting, and that’s not a metaphor

for anything either except maybe my midlife crisis, which I’m surely

having as there’s whiskey next to me and I’m up all night wondering

if I can be hairless again in some risqué places. Most days I refuse

to believe we’re doomed, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

I mean, it’s like the 1970s down there. Trust me. Most days, I listen

to NPR on my car radio and talk to one son or the other in the back seat

and ask them questions they sometimes answer as we drive home

past the pile of rubble and the leafless trees, which vaguely resemble

the girl I saw on campus wearing an entire shaggy outfit made from

flesh-colored plastic grocery bags campaigning on an environmental

platform for student council president. Her amazing bag-suit was rustling

in the breeze and it looked like she might take flight, just soar over campus

with the drones delivering burritos this week as a test stunt because

our motto here is Invent the Future, which I think about a lot—not as

‘your future’ in the sense of what I wanted to be when I grew up,

which I figured out by process of elimination was not a banker or a

computer programmer, and I never saw myself as a mother either but

here I am. More like I would invent a future where my black son will not

get shot by police for playing in a park, or driving, or walking from his

broken-down car. I would invent a future where there was always

enough chalk to leave notes for the next class: we are starting a revolution

somehow; instructions to follow. What no one told me about programming

computers for Merrill Lynch to keep their front-end trading systems

running past Y2K was that I was simply a dominatrix of code; the disaster

that would take our building down came later, and had nothing to do

with language. My cashier at Kroger has an epigraph on her name badge

under “Paula” that says, “I Will Make Things Right.” I hope that girl

wins her election. I hope that someday someone else will enter my

hairless palace and find it marvelous. The photos of broken glass; the piles

of rubble. The future is throttling towards us and it’s loud and reckless.

Rings of Fire, 2016

Craig Santos Perez

Honolulu, Hawaii

We host a small family party to celebrate

my daughter’s second birthday. This year

is the hottest in history, breaking the record

set when she was born. Still, I grill meat

over charcoal and watch smoke crawl

through air like the spirits of sacrificial

animals. Still, I crave a cigarette, even after

quitting five years ago, even after my clothes

no longer smell like my grandpa’s tobacco

breath (his oxygen tank still scratches the tiled

floor of memory and denial). My dad joins me

outside and says, “Son, when I die, scatter

my ashes to the ocean, far from this heat.”

Inside, my mom is cooking rice and steaming

vegetables. They’ve traveled from California,

where millions of trees have become tinder

after years of drought, fueling catastrophe.

When my daughter’s body first hosted fever,

the doctor said, “It’s a sign she’s fighting

infection.” Volcanoes erupt along fault lines

and disrupt flight patterns; massive flames

force thousands to evacuate tar sands

oil country. When we can’t control fire,

we name it “wild” and pray to God for rain;

when we can’t control God, we name it “war”

and pray to votives for peace. “If her fever

doesn’t break,” the doctor said, “take her

to emergency.” Violence rises with the temper-

ature, which knows no borders; air strikes

detonate hospitals in countries whose names

are burnt fossils: Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan,

South Sudan, Iraq . . . “When she crowned,”

my wife said, “it felt like rings of fire.”

Garment factories in Bangladesh char and

collapse; refugees self-immolate at a detention

center on Nauru; forests across Indonesia

are razed for palm oil plantations, their plumes,

like the ashen ghosts of birds, flock to our distant

rib cages. When my daughter can’t breathe,

we give her an asthma inhaler. But tonight,

we sing happy birthday and blow out

the candles together. The smoke trembles,

as if we all exhaled the same, flammable wish.

Past Barabbas

Roger Reeves

The funeral past and also I loved him.
And also I, him and so loved past him.
And so all funeral the past ran animal
Up to our eyes, and so, lo, I loved
Any which him, the I-him, the scandal-
Animal of him hanging his newborn
Twenty years past newborn out of a moving car,
The silence of the road sorrowing up.
I didn’t want to begin with music,
The cough of shovels, the hiss of white chairs
Tallying the fraudulence and broken
Hip of my uncle already five days
Past Barabbas, the shekels spent on Hen-
Nessey, the account drained, thieved, drained,
My father, seven days in silence, God
Touching his weariness (or not) like a hunter
That comes upon a broken instrument
In the woods, the thing made feral
By its brokenness so cautiously he attends
To the gut and tender of it, his hand
Raising the neck from the leaves, running one
Finger across its throat and listening
For blood or what blood remains howling. Wolf.

Poem in Which the Writer Sees Himself in an Old Textbook, 1943

Sam Sax

They cut off our hair
& there we were
Hairless.

A photograph
In a history i skimmed
So quick
I missed

We were there
Less than elsewhere
Our hair cut
So close the scalp
Gleamed

A row of six
Pixelated moons

Blood rose
To its feet

Our hair not ours
Once separated
Like a finger
Nail

The gold
From our teeth

Our hair burned
Made upholstery
Braided for women
Down the street

There on the page
The photograph

A camp A cage

Right angles
Impossible
Sharp as a fade
Razors in drag
Black boots & blades

I pull the image up
On my screen
Thumb the six
Bare heads
Sex organs
My face
My face

I’m alive of course
Because others died
& i’ll be survived
By no one

[amen] [amen] [amen]

My gift
To this planet
Extinction
The singed end
Of a family line

Today a man sits
Beside me
At the piano & plays
A song

My name’s in it
The one about a man
Rendered powerless
By the woman
Who takes his hair

Even here
With his breath
A flatiron
I’m standing
Between twin pillars

My arms cargo
Hardly mine

When he’s done
I take him
To bed & empty
My family
Into his darkness
Apologizing

[I’m sorry]
Again & again [i’m sorry] [i’m sorry]

Though i can’t quite say
Why

America: Hepatomancy

Alexandra Teague

If the liver is the source of blood: if the liver is the source

of life: if the people live with blood, visceral, on the sidewalks; the news

ticker divining Police Kill: the news ticker divining Supporters Shout;

if the people mow the bright green golf-course grass

of battlefields: Pea Ridge, Antietam: dust the sky with flags

and mow the grass, and the liver blinks toxic as a neon sign,

and the men move the pegs in the stock market

and the men water the grass; and Hate and Hate; and the men

say, Let the President; and the people say, Compassion; and the liver

reveals its dark deities on the walls of buildings;

its ancient symbols; and the liver reveals the people’s bodies

coursing strange bloods; and the men lean in closer to observe

how their pockets fill; and the liver shines like the knife

that opens it; the liver shines like a safe word on a tongue;

and someone says, It’s all consensual. And someone says, Help.

Poems from Tin House, Fall 2017

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