Jamaal May - The Big Book of Exit Strategies

2016 by Jamaal May All rights reserved Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org eISBN: 978-1-938584-36-7 Cover art: The Cycle by Brian Despain NOTE TO THE READER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: the confidence to kiss the girl or boy that would have made you Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Im grateful to the periodicals and anthologies in which earlier versions of the following poems first appeared: The Believer, Conducting Ivy with the Girl Down the Street Best American Poetry 2015 (Simon & Shuster), There Are Birds Here The Book of Scented Things (Literary House Press), Per Fumum Callaloo, Intake in the Ward, Megalophobia, It Shakes Us Still The Chattahoochee Review, Exit Interview, For Years You Trained for Being Lost at Sea The Cortland Review, section from A Brief History of Hostility as Pyrophobia Crazyhorse, Against Against, The Spirit Names of Stolen Books Fogged Clarity, Make Believe, Little Design Indiana Review, The Gun Joke Liberation (Beacon Press), FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration Lumina, Petrified at The End of All Things, Dare The MacGuffin, section from A Brief History of Hostility as They May Come to Break Us The Mainstreet Rag, Behind the Ward New Republic, Ruin Ninth Letter, From The Big Book of Exit Strategies, Sugar, History as Road Trip from Detroit to Mississipi PEN.org, Ode To the White-Line-Swallowing Horizon, God of the Ocean of Lumber, Open Mouth Requiem, Ode to Forgetting Ploughshares, Things That Break Poem (UK), FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, This is How I Know it Might Work Poem a Day, I Have This Way of Being Poetry, There Are Birds Here, Per Fumum, Water Devil, Respiration PoetryNow, Shift See Spot Run, Ask Where Ive Been, Mouth, In the Future You Will Be Your Own Therapist; Souwester, The Whetting of Teeth Water Stone, The Tendencies of Walls Thank you to organizations that supported the editing of this collection: The Lannan Foundation, The Kenyon Review, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and all the colleges, universities, high schools and community groups that graciously invited me to share, learn, and grow through my visits with them.

Of course, I am especially thankful for the emotional support and the skilled mind of amar priyo kobi, amar priyo kobita, Tarfia Faizullah. For us and them and them and us. Ask Where Ive Been Let fingers roam the busy angles of my shoulders. Ask why skin dries in rime-white patches, cracks like a puddle stepped on. Ask about the scars that interrupt blacktop, a keloid on my bicep: this fogged window. Ask how many days passed before the eyebrow healed after a metal spike was torn out, uprooted lamppost in a tornado. Ask about the tornado of fists.

The blows landed. If you can watch it allthe spit and blood frozen against snow, you can probably tell I am the too-narrow road winding out of a crooked city built of laughter, abandon, feathers, and drums. Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow, bridges arc, and power lines sag, and still believe what matters most is not where I bend but where I am growing. There Are Birds Here For Detroit There are birds here, so many birds here, is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between fences and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girls hands tear and toss like confetti.

No, I dont mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make out of a building. I mean the confetti a boy cant stop smiling about, and no his smile isnt much like a skeleton at all. And no their neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say the neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they wont stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in your birdless city. Ode to the White-Line-Swallowing-Horizon Apologies to the moths that died in service to my windshields cross-country journey. Apologies to the fine country cooking vomited into a rest stop bathroom.

Apologies to the rest stop janitor. To the mop, galvanized bucket, sawdust, and push broomthe felled tree it was cut from, dulled saw, blistered hand, I offer my apologies. To the road. To the white-line-swallowing-horizon. Ive used you almost up. Im sorry I dont know another way to push the charcoal outline of that house into the ocean-dark behind me.

For being a grown man with a boogeyman at his back. Apologies to the grown man growing out of a splintering boys body, all apologies due to the splinters. Little ones, you shouldve been a part of something whole. Things That Break Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth. Switches cut down by a child to lash a childs legs.

A siege does something like this against sturdy walls. The wrong rules. A dozen angel figurines flying from a balcony. Flailing fist. Splint. Forefinger and index, dislocated (not broken).

One points to the left of a man and the rubbery thing inside quivers familiar. Raise your hand if you know how to do this. If enough hair fails to escape the pull of a drain, and the drain sputters and fails to swallow water, we will likely say its broken. Waves. Traffic lights. The craven infantry of roaches at the flick of a switch.

Willa child in a shrinking living room sitting more still than the father. As the Saying Goes A bird in the hand smells like a human. A closed mouth gathers a storm of questions. A coward dies. A hero dies. A civilian dies thousands of deaths.

A fool and his money are soon pardoned. Children should be seen as a herd of elephant feet. If you cant beat them, beat them. Cold steel, warm slug. No guts, no voice, no bones. No news is good.

Nothing ventured, nothing stained burgundy. A gurney of a thousand screams begins with a single death. A thorn is a thorn is a thorn. Absence makes the heart grow maggots. All roads lead to gravestone. Not all that glitters fits into a jar.

Alls well that ends. April showers the graveyard with apple blossom petals. Any storm in a drought. Ask not what my country will do to you Ashes and ashes and dust and dust and dust and ashes and dust. FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration