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To be apart, I’m told.
To be asunder.
To be a privative, negative, reversing force.
To be reached only by oaths and curses.
To have black sheep sacrificed in my name
because I’m a god, yes,
as we are all gods on occasion.
To be bodied as I am bodied.
To be rich of earth,
which is to be chronically chthonic.
To be where the gems are—
underground.
To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.
To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections: Count the Waves (W. W. Norton, 2015); I Was the Jukebox (W. W. Norton, 2010), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. In 2015 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.

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About this Poem

“Before there was Hades, there was the Roman god Dīs Pater. My work has always engaged mythologies and origin stories, but here I’m also inspired by my community of dis kin. My forthcoming collection, Made to Explode, includes poems that embrace a social model of disability rather than a medical model. In other words—a cure is not always the goal, and the problem often lies not in our disabilities, but in the failure of those around us to accommodate and include. In 2016, activist and writer Lawrence Carter-Long launched a campaign to reclaim ‘disabled’ as an identity, versus ‘special’ or ‘different’ or any other euphemism.”
—Sandra Beasley

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American Rome

Marion “Shepilov” Barry, Jr. (1936-2014)

Sandra Beasley

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The Sword Swallower's Valentine

You had me at that martini. I saw
you thread the olive’s red pimento throat
with your plastic swizzle stick, a deft act
at once delicate and greedy. A man
paid to taste the blade knows his match.
The pleasure. The brine. I wish we had time,
I said—you stopped me—There’s always time.
That’s when they called me to the stage. I saw
your mouth’s angle change as you made a match
of my name and Noted Gullet! Steel Throat!
Ramo Swami, the Sword-Swallowing Man.
I want to assure you it’s just an act,

Sandra Beasley

2018

The Conversation

Fireflies, Col. Glenn calls them—
banging the capsule’s wall to prove
their movement. This
will be the gesture Hollywood

claims as history—how space
dazzles even the seasoned airman,
maddens like Titania’s touch.
The movie version sees

what he sees: Florida yawn, Delta yawp,
a sunrise inside every hour,
lightning over the Indian Ocean.
Yet the operatic soundtrack, paced

in gilded silence, is not what he hears.
Wonder-ese is not the language
he speaks. For this,
we turn to the transcript. Pilot

Sandra Beasley

2014

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