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From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

Dawn Lundy Martin

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,

we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over

instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has

never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance

of materials soaked with sentences already made in air

and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under

its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design

Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming

apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look

at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

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.

About Dawn Lundy Martin

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About this Poem

“This poem is the continuation of a sequence of poems I began while collaborating with Toi Derricotte on a chapbook titled, A Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance. We published that book and then shortly after the pandemic happened and I wanted to write something that reflected/reflects the complexity of that change both as it happens inside of us and outside of us. And, also, grapple with the helplessness as we face what appears to be unfaceable and unknowable.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin

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From “The Laceration”

As if the tender body is. As if the will is tender

And like any creature that has its hood up, you

take a photo of yourself in front of a window, rain

so dark, the day/perspective so desired. You are so

desperate for beautiful adventure, the lights shut off

and the sweat of some hot stranger in your mouth. As if

Dawn Lundy Martin

2021

Nothingness

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring.

Dawn Lundy Martin

2019

—My form against those at border—

[arbitrary line] [perish]

	knocking among other refugees

	—the islands
	—no one to help
	—thousands buried by water

A butchered animal at my feet.

Wolves howl. Soot falls from sky.

The rescuers are never prepared.
And we, here, amid a failure of images.

Scrub a spot whiter than before.
Demarcate before there is nothing left.

Breach into white sand. The dead ache so.

Dawn Lundy Martin

2017

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From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

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