what we do not dream we cannot manufacture

Art follows ear and echo

covers/chooses

selective

eyesight searches the dust

and is surprised by love’s

apophatic blinking

 

what love sees in daily light

holds open color—ink, roar, melody and quiet

is its own steady gaze

to better endure bumps

 

“always more song to be sung” between the words

jars memory and its subatomic underscore

moving at the speed of thought underscore

 

in random thirsts rise underscore

name the sensations, underscore

to fish for breath, underscore

combing through hair as tangled as nets, as underscore

 

thick as the beat of blossoms’ underscore

 

a fine line between mind and senses spinning underscore

in which her/my/their body becomes expert underscore

without waiting for unified theory,

 

loving the body of one’s choice andunderscore

 

to live so surrounded underscore

with fewer asterisks and underscore

more verbs andunderscore

fewer security alerts Underscore
 


there eloquence before underscore

and above

underscore the grave.
 

*For Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor

Copyright © 2020 by Erica Hunt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 1, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Inhabitant of earth for forty something years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

It is a peaceful country.

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to buy shampoo,
pick up the children from school,
get basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.

It is a peaceful country.

And it clips our citizens’ bodies
effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.

All of us
still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,
of remembering to make
a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,
but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky
as the avenue spins on its axis.
How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

From Deaf Republic. Copyright © 2019 by Ilya Kaminsky. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press.