Forecast
I twist myself into a knot
the day pulls taut.
I am what I am
told. Good red meat
gone necrotic. A spot of black
spread out to ruin
a perfect evening. It’s the way
the weather wears me.
A cold, blank day. My blood-
burned fingers. A white noise
swelling in me. It’s nothing
but night now. That’s how
all the days end. An hour
glistens in its glass case, turns
rancid in my memory.
Another day, another
dress the day lays out
before me. I grow older
if I’m lucky.
And I’m lucky.
My sad heart in its excess.
Such petty injury. I am worn
against the weather. Limp and prone
to empty.
What came before this.
I can’t remember.
I dress for all the lives I want
behind me. I have come here
to make seen the day
I see. I fall from focus.
The day goes sour. It asks me
nothing. It asks nothing of me.
Copyright © 2015 by Camille Rankine. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 1, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of the self as it exists in the ether of one’s mind, and what happens to that interior identity when the physical form that contains it moves through the world, coming up against all the expectations a culture has of its various bodies, all the identities we construct for each other based on what we see. In what ways do we resist these expectations, or resign ourselves to them? How do we reconcile the self that lives within us with what is seen of us, or what isn’t seen?”
—Camille Rankine
Camille Rankine
