From “Life in a Box is a Pretty Life”

Lake, interminable. I do not know where my house is. Where is my house? Summer steams by. Every border is cocked and ready. Flatten body against cool earth. Lie without sound. Be a cool corpse under wire teeth. The police are so young. They do not hear the wailing. Wailing, I’m told, is a figment of your imagination. What to know of the body’s refusal to open, of its hidden cave? Put the cave inside another cave so no one can reach it. Perspiration aches. Strain against dirt walls. I have come to you from a metal house. We had steel barriers to protect us from the sun. The lake drifts into forever. Windows here are small and I cannot see myself in them. What it is to be captured without spoons.

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About this Poem

“This poem is a part of a larger meditation on human dignity that winds through my new book. What speech does the contemporary moment allow when that speaking or attempted speech regards global displacement, local brutalization, and abject apathy?”
—Dawn Lundy Martin

Author

Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin is author of four books of poetry including most recently, Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award. She is the Toi Derricotte Chair in English and Director of the Center for African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.

Date Published

02/02/2015